Fic: Multiply (the sum of our parts) - Chapter One
Title: Multiply (the sum of our parts)
Author: 1electricpiratexkeijukainenx
Rating: M
Pairing: Sherlock Holmes/John Watson (BBC)
Summary: After Reichenbach and in order to 1) Keep Sherlock alive, 2) Keep John alive and 3) Get Sherlock home to England as soon as possible, Mycroft devises a plan that will not only incentivise John's continued sanity and survival but force Sherlock to come running. It is a perfect plan, though perhaps less than ethically sound. He has no doubts that using frozen samples of your younger brother's sperm to create children for his husband to care for falls deeply within the realm of socially unacceptable behaviour, but it is efficient, and that is what matters most.
Author's Notes: It has been said that it takes a village to raise a baby and this story is no exception. I've lost track of the number of people who have coaxed and egged and cheered me through this. Special mention goes to Dylan, Carly, and the Other Skanks (you know who you are) without whom this would still be a particularly annoying and slightly disturbing idea at the back of my mind. So thanks for that, you mentalists.
The story is planned out to completion and is nearly 3/4 written, so have no fear that it will cease to update event though it says it is unfinished. I have not used archive warnings but I believe I ought to mention that there are some rather questionable family-planning ethics at work here. If you're not down with alternative familial arrangements, probably you shouldn't read this. Also, this is an AU and I have not even *tried* to be true to the original canon timelines. You have been warned. The story has been beta'd rather thoroughly and any mistakes that remain are mine and mine alone.Disclaimer: I do not pretend to own any of these characters (besides the two or three I have conjured from thin air). Credit for that brilliance falls to ACD and the Godtiss.
Chapter One - The Limit Does Not Exist
It was Mycroft’s idea, originally.
John would never have, could never have thought of it on his own.
It was insane and sick and yet logical and touching in the way that only a Holmesian idea could be.
Sherlock would have approved of that aspect of the idea at least. But that wasn’t why John eventually said, “Yes, please. I’ll take you up on that, even though its the most bizarre thing I’ve ever heard of.”
In the end, John says yes because even though it is sick, and twisted, he can’t bear to exist in a world so completely devoid of any part of Sherlock Holmes but the body laying cold in freshly dug ground.
So John says “Yes, Mycroft, please,” and nine months later, he gets a call from St. Barts that has him running out the door with trepidation and yes, that is a little tinge of happiness, sitting heavy in his gut.
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Sherlock, for his part, should have seen it coming before it was too late. But of course Moriarty knows him too well, knew exactly which strings to pull to make him dance like a little paper-cut monkey.
It is humiliating and what’s more, it is tragic.
The words go around and around in his head as he climbs the stairs to the roof of St. Barts. I will burn the heart out of you.
Three bullets; three people. His heart, in three pieces, spread across London (an attempt to hide it, backfired, only made it easier to target). He cannot bear the thought of Mrs. Hudson and Lestrade hurt on his behalf, but he imagines he would survive their deaths.
But not John’s. Never John. And there it is, the crux of the matter. Moriarty has made a mistake but it is not big enough, not significant enough to count; the end result is the same. Sherlock’s heart is in three pieces spread across London but his soul is in the hands of John Watson, MD.
At least, he prides himself, it is not out of selfish reasons (the need to survive - always rather low on his list of priorities, until lately, until certain promises whispered into the honey-gold skin at the back of John Watson’s knees) that he decides he will do anything to keep John alive. (For John’s death will kill him too, he is fully aware of that.) Sherlock does not want to keep John alive because he wants to keep himself alive. He wants to keep John alive because John is everything, everything that is good and right in the world, and because John deserves to live for his own merits. He wants to save John because he loves him as he has never loved any human being in his life.
He would die for John, but he does not think that John would want him to do that. So instead of dying for John, he jumps.
(Jumps? Is it jumping if you’re forced? He falls. He is pushed. He lets himself be pushed off the roof of St. Barts hospital by the bullet in Moriarty’s brain and as he falls he prays to every deity he has ever heard of that his mother knows what she’s talking about.)
Mummy does not disappoint and so Sherlock, in not dying for John, dies. He fades out of life as he knows it and England in general with one last longing glimpse at the man he has just killed himself (in effigy) to protect and goes about doing just that: protecting him.
One day, he will be back. One day, he will explain. He lives for the day he sees John’s face again. He knows John might hate him, might punch him, might never talk to him again, but it is worth it to know that John is alive, and safe, and not being put in danger because he made the foolish mistake of falling in love with Sherlock Holmes.
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It takes Mycroft three weeks to work it out.
When he finally realises what has happened, what Sherlock has done, what he is doing, Mycroft sits back in his chair and closes his eyes and stays that way for a good half hour, until Madeline (yesterday she was Olivia) tells him he has an urgent call on the line from the President of the Ukraine.
He will hand it to his younger brother - just this once, he has really outdone himself.
Of course, Mummy must have been in on it. A worldwide hunting spree, a faked death, a corpse of questionable origin masquerading as Sherlock Holmes at the foot of a stark, plain tombstone? The entire thing reeks of her particular brand of outdated espionage. It’s base, Cold War-level trickery worthy of a Le Carré novel, and not much beyond that. Mycroft sneers despite himself: the entire thing is vulgar and pedestrian and shot with so many flaws that Mycroft cannot believe his own mother and brother thought it up.
And yet, it appears to have worked. It certainly worked on him for long enough to get Sherlock well out of the country; it is definitely working on John.
The thought of John is an uncomfortable one. Mycroft genuinely likes his brother-in-law, but John (quite rightfully) has never trusted him. Of course, he does not understand that once a Holmes (even if you do not take the name), always a Holmes, and that the Holmeses always take care of themselves first.
No, Sherlock would never have bothered to explain that particular family quirk to his husband. It would never have crossed his mind; as was patently obvious by this particular stunt. Why he’d thought Mummy a better option than his big brother, Mycroft would perhaps never understand.
The crisis in the Ukraine dealt with, Mycroft returns to the problem at hand: namely, keeping both of his brothers alive and sane until such a time as they could be safely reunited.
Sherlock, despite his own inherent hint of madness, is actually the least of his concerns. Sherlock has had, from a very young age, the best training money can buy in combat, survival, and escape. He is not, in fact, suicidal and Mycroft has great faith that he will do everything in his power to get back, in some shape or form, to John as quickly as he can.
Mycroft also knows that nothing, but nothing would make Sherlock do something this idiotic except for a direct, deadly and inescapable threat to John Watson. No, Mycroft is quite sure that when Sherlock made his decisions, he made them quickly, desperate to find a way to keep himself and his doctor alive.
The poor boy can be so dreadfully simple-minded sometimes, Mycroft thinks as he sighs, and turns his thoughts instead to the surprisingly quixotic and difficult puzzle that is John Watson.
John has all but dropped off the radar since the funeral - which means, of course, he is not doing anything. Anything at all. He is staying with his sister (the drunk lesbian, Mycroft recalls, a hint of disdain seeping into his otherwise irreproachable thoughts) and he seems to do nothing but sit on the settee and watch so much terrible TV Mycroft is almost surprised the poor man hasn’t taken drastic action against the TV set.
Every night at 7:30 John checks his phone, grimaces and throws it at the couch. Mycroft wonders if his brother was clever enough to set up some sort of code, and then realizes that that is exactly what he had done and exactly what causes the horrible, haunted look of loathing and longing on John Watson’s face every day. (CCTV footage is not always quite so clear, but Mycroft is very good at knowing which cameras ought to be upgraded when.)
Mycroft has not known John long, but he knows him well enough to understand that John is sinking fast, and that soon he will flounder and he will drown, and that will be the end of John Watson (and, by default, the end of Sherlock Holmes).
So, Mycroft sets out his objectives clearly in his head:
1) Keep Sherlock alive. This has been Mycroft’s primary objective since the age of 14 and is not liable to change any time soon.
2) Keep John Watson alive and sane. This has direct relevance to Objective 1, as without John, Sherlock is sure to go ballistic and probably do Jim’s men a favour and off himself.
3) (Which has direct relevance to the success of Objectives 1 & 2) Get Sherlock home at earliest convenience and allow ruthless trained killers to take over his endeavours (because really, Mycroft has been holding off ridding the world of Jim’s spider web until he could find appropriate justification; if only Sherlock had asked, they could have spared themselves this entire maudlin palaver.)
4) In order to succeed at Objectives 1 through 3, find some solution that will both incentivise John’s continued survival and sanity (without revealing to him the reality of what his husband has done, as John is without doubt the worst actor Mycroft has ever had the misfortune to see attempt to lie) and Sherlock’s speedy return to England.
A man named Occam once had a razor, and Mycroft has been his biggest fan since the age of five. The answer occurs to him, of course, in record time, as his eyes glide over a well-worn picture that he keeps in the top right hand corner of his desk.
The answer’s name is, against all odds, Rosie.
Pleased with himself, Mycroft sets about putting his plan into action.
Sherlock may be many things to many people, but one thing he is not is difficult to manipulate, especially if you know which buttons to press. Mycroft has made it a point, in his thirty-five years acquaintance with his younger brother, always to know which buttons to press.
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When John wakes up, he does not know where he is, until he feels the silk sheets beneath him and knows, instantly, that they will be periwinkle blue.
Eastwell Manor. Kent.
Mycroft.
John gasps for breath and jolts upwards in bed, taking in his surroundings. He is in Sherlock’s bedroom in his old home, surrounded by the things his husband loved as a child. For five minutes, John struggles to breathe, assaulted by memories of the last time he set foot in this room. They had been blissfully, stupidly happy; two weeks after their impromptu wedding, and John remembers that Sherlock had looked at him as if he held the sun and the stars in his hands. John remembers the way Sherlock’s ivory skin looked splayed out across periwinkle blue silk, arching into the gold-tinged skin of John’s fingers. John remembers the way it felt to have Sherlock look him in the eyes and say to his face that he loved him for the first time.
John remembers all these things with the clarity of cut crystal, but he does not remember meeting with Mycroft last night. It must have happened; Mycroft had been bugging him to meet with him for weeks, the insufferable bastard. Just like him to capture a bloke when he’s drunk and defenceless.
He decides abruptly that he cannot be in this room a single moment longer and extracts himself from the sheets as quickly as he can. His limp is coming back and he hates it, but for now he can still manage without a cane. The suit that is laid out for him on a rickety wooden chair is immaculate, but obviously made from the measurements taken for John’s wedding reception suit; he’s lost weight since then, the shirt hangs from his shoulders awkwardly and he has to tighten the belt quite tight to keep the trousers on his hips.
The manor is still, seemingly, asleep, as John picks his way through vaguely familiar hallways towards the breakfast room. (He remembers Sherlock’s vague look of disdain as he explained to John that yes, they did have separate rooms for eating each meal. In fact, they had two lunch rooms and several rooms dedicated to dinner, depending on the weather and type of company being kept.) A spasm of pain shoots through his leg and John has to stop, briefly, and lean against the wall until it passes.
Sherlock had been resplendent here, among all this subdued and understated grandeur. The Holmes family had surrounded themselves with the kind of splendour that spoke to being properly, anciently, filthily rich. They were not flashy, by and large, preferring to use their wealth to buy things of taste rather than opulence. Sherlock, who always seemed too cramped and folded up into awkward shapes in their small, cluttered flat in London, had stretched himself out and strode through these ridiculously beautiful halls with a magnificence that John had not been able to define or quantify. The only comparison to be made was that of a wild animal in its natural habitat: cooped up in a cage, it became awkward and ungainly; when allowed to roam free through it’s own habitat, it was noble and majestic.
Sherlock had hated the people and expectations that tended to come hand in hand with his upbringing, but John knew instantly that he loved Eastwell Manor in itself (as opposed to all the things it stood for) nearly as much as he loved London (and his love for London was boundless).
John, feeling the world swimming about him in an all-too-familiar way, sighs and pushes these thoughts from his mind. They don’t help, they never help; nothing can ever help that particular wound.
Sherlock is gone and John is left behind, as per usual, as was always inevitable, and there is nothing to do but soldier on.
John makes it to the breakfast room with the same sort of satisfaction he would have had in successfully navigating a minefield. He expects to find it empty, given the near-dead hush of the manor about him, but instead comes face to face with his head captor: his mother-in-law.
“John, darling.” Celeste Holmes’ voice is soft, and low, and tinged with the wisdom brought only by age and the acute intelligence she acquired, John is convinced, along with her last name. “Come, have some tea.”
He has met this woman twice before in his life; once at his wedding reception (an event which had occurred solely at her insistence) and once at her son’s funeral. She occupies a special place in John Watson’s heart - the woman that gave birth to both Mycroft and Sherlock Holmes deserves some sort of national recognition, John feels. Beyond that, she is the only person that he has ever seen Sherlock defer to for advice - meaning she is very, very clever indeed.
Not to mention, she is utterly charming, surprisingly witty and deviously cheeky. She is, in John’s eyes, perfect, and John hates himself for hating her as she sits across from him and pours him a tea blend that must have cost the earth from a silver pot into a china cup so delicate John is loathe to touch it lest it break under his clumsy, Watsonian hands. (He remembers Sherlock’s hands, curled gracefully around the china cup, cradling it gently to his face. He remembers Sherlock’s fingers translucent white against the blue and bone china and the ache in his leg reaches his stomach and his chest and John cannot breathe with how much he misses the mad bastard he’d married, all those months ago.)
(Months, not years, months, this isn’t how it’s supposed to go, surely, this is all wrong.)
(It’s absurd, the way you look at my hands. Do you know you do that in public? - They’re lovely hands. I want them on me always. - Be careful what you wish for, John Watson, for you might just get it. I wish, I wish, I wish, John thinks, but it is never enough.)
“John?” Celeste is speaking to him; is watching him with Sherlock’s eyes over the top of the silver tea service. She is holding out a full plate with one steady hand; her fingers are stubbier than Sherlock’s, and the illusion shatters blissfully and John can breathe once again.
“Thanks,” he mumbles. The look Celeste is giving him reeks of pity but John does not, cannot register it. He focuses on his eggs and does not think about how Sherlock’s eyes are looking at him out of someone else’s face.
“Darling, you don’t look at all well. To be expected, of course, but I wish you’d eat more often.”
John tips his head, an acknowledgement of her concern, a notice of his disgruntlement at being forced into her presence in the first place.
“Mycroft telephoned me last night; said he’d found you passed out in the gutter somewhere. I suggested he bring you here, and we alerted your sister, of course.”
“Oh,” John says. He drinks tea. A scone sits in his other hand, trembling like a leaf. He has never felt more British and less glad of it.
“Mycroft also said I was to tell you he’ll be back later to check in on you. Some terrible to do about gas lines in eastern Poland. He does get into such a fluster about the most ridiculous of problems.” Celeste’s smile is that of a doting mother, but her eyes are cold and calculated, the eyes of a solider, of a scientist, of a killer, of a spy. They are Sherlock’s eyes and John wants, for a horrible split second, to gouge them out of her head with his fingernails and then maybe eat them so he could both own them totally and never have to see them again.
“I should get back to London,” he says, lamely. There is no way they will let him go now they’ve got him, but he feels he ought at least to try to escape.
“I won’t hear of it, John, not until we get some meat back on that body. You’re family, now, and we look after our family.” She smiles the same smile at him (lips warm, eyes cold; don’t cross me, John Watson - the great Mycroft and Sherlock Holmes are but quivering boys underneath my gaze. Know your place. Pick your battles. Don’t make this more difficult than it already is).
John nods, accepts defeat, and forces himself to swallow a bite of the scone.
The manor grounds are humble, John supposes, as these sorts of things go. He harbours a very secret penchant for dramatic adaptations of Jane Austen novels and in comparison to the houses featured there, he reckons that Eastwell Manor is modest but respectable. Just like the rest of the family. It’s facade is imposing but charming, covered as it is with ivy (currently ranging in colour from scarlet to gold, a delightful burst of colour against the almost exhausting wash of green that are the grounds.)
John wanders the grounds for most of the day, discovering the old gatehouse as he goes, and nearly tripping over what seems to be a Par 4 hole in a very well-hidden golf course.
It is September and Sherlock has been dead for two months. John knows this, has always known it, but he did not really believe it until yesterday, when he found the note inside the skull when he was cleaning out the flat.
“My dearest John. I will leave this for you to find in case my plan goes awry. You are my heart, John, and I will not let him hurt you. I will not let him burn you. You are my heart, and he cannot touch you, not while I have breath in my body to stop him.
You were fantastic. We were fantastic. I will love you with every atom in my being until I am nothing but dust.
I remain yours, faithfully and until we both shall die,
-Sherlock Holmes”
John had read the letter once, twice, five times and then thrown the skull in his hands at the wall. It did not have the decency to shatter but merely clattered to the floor, rolling there indolently as John fell to his knees and cried as if the tears could rip his heart out and stop it hurting quite so badly.
Then, crying over, he had gone to the pub.
The last thing he remembered was Greg’s kind, pitying smile, the twist of his wedding band around his left finger and the taste of neat whiskey.
Greg must have called Mycroft. Devious bastards, always teaming up against them. Against him. There is no more them. There is no more us. There is just John Watson, alone against the world once more. Surely this is not how it was meant to go.
His leg is aching. He walked miles and never left the Holmes estate, and he has eaten nothing but half a scone and a cup of tea all day. It is half past five and yet night threatens to fall (the nights are drawing in, closer and closer, and John is violently reminded that this is Sherlock’s favourite time of the year) as he clambers up the stairs and into the manor proper.
Mycroft is waiting for him in Sherlock’s quarters. He has placed himself in one of the overstuffed armchairs, though he does have the decency, at least, to have left Sherlock’s things just as he found them.
“Ah. John. We were just about to call out the search party.”
“Mycroft.” John nods, crossing awkwardly to the settee nearest the fire and putting his leg gingerly up on the foot rest. “Care to explain your little kidnapping heist?”
“Detective Inspector Lestrade and I agreed it might be best to bring you here to Mummy instead of letting you return to your sisters. We rather thought she could do without the sight of her baby brother passed out on the floor and covered in traces of his own vomit.”
John winces at the words but he does not let them phase him.
“You’ve no right to kidnap me, Mycroft,” he snips waspishly at his brother-in-law, refusing to look at him.
“And you’ve no right to drink yourself into an early grave,” Mycroft snaps back. “I promised Sherlock a long time ago that if anything happened to him I would look after you and I do not intend to break that promise by watching you drink yourself dead.”
“Fuck you,” John growls, but there is no real heat in it. He is as trapped here now as Sherlock had been as a child. I wish, I wish, I wish; the refrain plays over and over in his head and he closes his eyes in order to focus more energy on the words.
“John, I have a proposition for you.”
“I don’t want to hear it, Mycroft.”
Mycroft smiles at him, the simpering smile John is sure he uses on all sorts of difficult diplomats right before laying down some kind of K.O. shot to their best laid plans. Never let it be said that Mycroft Holmes is not one of the most terrifying men in Britain. John sighs and slumps, defeated before he even begins to fight.
“Quite,” Mycroft says, heaving himself out of the chair. John resists the temptation to make a quip about too much cake. Needling Mycroft about his weight is firmly in Sherlock’s area of jurisdiction. John is not quite ready to encroach upon it just yet.
Mycroft leads John to a hidden door behind a tapestry in Sherlock’s bedroom, through the rather large library it opens onto and through yet another hidden door into the kind of laboratory that would not be out of place in some kind of Sci-Fi movie.
“Father’s old lab,” Mycroft explains, obviously noticing John’s slightly bewildered face. “Mummy gave Sherlock free reign in here after he nearly burned down the east wing for the second time.”
John barely has time to wonder what they are doing here before Mycroft leads him to an enormous stainless steel refrigerator and gestures at a lab stool for John to sit on.
Mycroft waits, pointedly, for him to sit down before continuing. The Holmes brothers - never above a bit of drama. John obliges, because he wants to get out of this room that seems to be full of the ghost of Sherlock. John has never seen Sherlock here but he can imagine him, as a child or perhaps a lanky, precocious teenager, running all sorts of experiments on door mice and butterflies and bits of roadkill. The cool blue-tinged lighting would have made him look like an alien, like he had that first day in Barts when Stamford had stood by and smirked, pleased with himself, not knowing what it was he’d just done to both of them.
John’s chest hurts.
“Excellent. Now. First my proposition, and then explanations. I want you to think about it, John, and think about it properly. You and I both know that neither of us have a perfect moral compass, though I daresay yours is a sight better than mine, but I hope you won’t deem it necessary insult me with the artificial concerns for overly-developed ethics that the general population seems to find so tediously necessary.”
John raises a single eyebrow and crosses his arms across his chest. He says nothing. Mycroft continues.
“You are alone, now, and you are drifting. You find it difficult to understand the point of carrying on without Sherlock, at least some part of him, by your side. Eventually, you will give up. I am loathe to sit by and watch that happen to the only brother I have left. So, here is my proposition to you.”
With a flourish, the freezer door opens and John is suddenly glad he is sitting down.
There are rows upon rows of test tubes and containers, filling the freezer near to bursting. Each one is labelled in Sherlock’s spiked scrawl (attempting to be neat and methodical but never quite patient enough). There are pieces of bird beaks and the slime of a single slug; butterfly wings and the spleen of a rat. But John knows these are not the things Mycroft wants him to see, and he finds that he cannot breathe.
At the top of freezer is a small shelf, just high enough to fit a test tube in. There are twenty of them there, side by side, each one labelled meticulously.
Sherlock Holmes, they read. Then an age. A date. Several other numbers which John realises with the dawning sense of horror are pH readings, protein content, sperm counts.
It takes John all of two minutes to realise what, exactly, it is that Mycroft is suggesting.
“Jesus Christ,” he murmurs. His hand covers his mouth, then his eyes. He cannot look at the man who is standing there so cooly suggesting that he, for all intents and purposes, clone his dead husband. (Can’t clone humans, wouldn’t be a clone, a baby, a child, half-Sherlock half-some other person, some woman, but still half-Sherlock, a part of Sherlock alive and kicking, a part of Sherlock he could hold in his arms and never let go.)
Steadying breaths. Deep, steadying breaths. The freezer door closes; John lets his hand fall from his face, his eyes thunderous when he looks at his brother-in-law. “You... That’s... There are no words for how wrong that is. You’re ... God, bloody insane, the lot of you.”
“Is it so wrong?” Mycroft is indulging him, playing along with his resistance. “I wonder. Ethics, Doctor Watson, make for a rather sticky subject, don’t you think? Is it so wrong to create a child for yourself? How is it more wrong for you, a responsible, caring, loving person, to ... commission as it were, a child, than some 16 year-old who is attempting to secure housing benefits? Or, perhaps you are suggesting you are less worthy of having a child by the person you love than is a mother who in fact hates children and will abuse it for the rest of it’s life?” Mycroft hums softly under his breath. “I anticipated your initial disgust at the idea, John, but I also hope you see that your concern is largely unfounded.”
John is struggling to breathe.
His mind races. “I can’t just... I can’t just conjure up a child because I’m mourning my dead husband. Because I’m lonely. I couldn’t... That’s not... This is a whole life you’re talking about, Mycroft, an actual human life!”
“Oh come now, John, please don’t insult me. I know full well what I am talking about. Of course, it’s not just one human life we’re talking about, John, it’s two. A potential child’s, yes, but also yours.” Mycroft smiles at him, still indulgent, still patient, and John wants to rip his face off with his bare hands.
John shakes his head, speechless. There are no words to say. Even if there were, John wouldn’t know how to say them. This is the most preposterous thing he has ever heard of. Surely this is not happening to him. Surely this is some sort of nightmare. Surely he can’t actually be thinking about this as if it were a plausible option.
Mycroft waits and watches, lets the reality of his proposition sink in, before clearing his throat and breaking into the maelstrom of thoughts in John’s head. “Mummy will be wondering where we are, I’m afraid. Come John. Let’s have tea, and you can think about it some more.”
John nods and follows - because what else is he going to do?
They take tea in the winter garden, a charming room right out of a Better Homes and Gardens spread, painted in a delicious warm yellow and decorated with white garden furniture, pots overflowing with delicate and expensive greenery - flowers, ferns, what looks like a tiny orange tree. The sun is setting across the grounds and the room is lit from above by hanging glass lanterns. They would have been gas, once, but now the warm glow of electricity tricks John into feeling as if the room has trapped the sunlight and refused to let it go.
Celeste is dazzling in a deep blue dress suit, hair pulled into a loose bun at the back of her head, not a single strand out of place. There is a simple black brooch pinned at her breast, the only nod to mourning her dead son in the entire ensemble. John is deliriously grateful that she is not wearing black. He could not have borne it. She is pouring tea from a bone china tea pot, probably hand painted with those delicate blue patterns somewhere in China hundreds of years ago, John thinks. He does not think about Sherlock’s fingers curling around the cups. He will not let himself.
“I see Mycroft has informed you of his little plan,” Celeste says, without further ado, and John slides into the white wicker chair across from her, not even bothering to nod his acknowledgement. “Tea, dear.” John accepts the tea (he is powerless, here, to refuse anything they tell him to do; he wonders vaguely how he got to be here) and sips at it carefully. Just the right amount of sugar. Damn her. “And Pierre has simply outdone himself on the scones this afternoon. I insist you try one.”
The scone is as light as air; John smothers it in cream and jam and eats it despite himself while Celeste and Mycroft look on in thinly veiled approval. It occurs to John that they were not kidding when they meant he was part of their family now. It is clear they have adopted him, and that he has no say in the matter.
Sherlock would have hated it. John would be inclined to agree.
Sherlock. Sherlock would have scoffed at this whole ordeal. He would have called Mycroft all the names under the sun for being such an interfering bastard; he would have glared at his mother over the table and refused even the tiniest bite of these (heavenly) scones. He would have huffed off in a billow of coat tails and gone to curl up on one of the couches in the sitting room (Regency era chaise longue, darling, bit ratty around the edges but it does wonders for my back) and made sure that the entire house (and all of Kent, for that matter) was aware that he was sulking.
“Wrong,” Mycroft intones, breaking into his thoughts. Celeste is busying herself pouring more tea into John’s cup (the first has gone cold. How long had be been thinking about Sherlock’s body thrown in angry lines across that delicious mint green chaise longue? Long enough to be getting on with.) “If you’ll forgive me for stating the obvious, Doctor Watson, we have known Sherlock much longer than you have, and I can tell you that what you’re thinking right now is wrong.”
“Pardon?” John makes a big deal of sipping from his tea; it scalds his tongue. His entire body is somehow aching. He just wants to go to sleep and never wake up.
“Sherlock was always a funny thing,” Celeste says, as if responding to a different conversation. Mycroft purses his lips; she ignores him. “Such a flighty child. We did try to calm him but he became so very defensive over the years. Partially my fault, of course, but mostly his own.”
John does not understand what they are talking about, so he drinks more tea. Takes another bite of his scone. Curses his own, very British inability to abandon stoicism in favour of causing a scene. It has never seemed quite so inconvenient until now.
“Once, at the age of eleven, he read a psychology text book and spent weeks telling anyone who would listen to him that he was a sociopath,” Celeste continues, in the tone of a young mother telling the story of the one time her dearest child had upset the sugar bowl. Such a silly duckling, her tone seemed to say. John knew better than to take any Holmesian tone of voice at face value, though. “Of course, he was no such thing. Never has been. But it was easier for him that way.”
John knows this already. Had deduced it himself within twelve hours of meeting the man. For all his prickles, for all his icy cold disdain, Sherlock was, at heart, a vulnerable, hurt child, tortured by the world at large in perpetuity for daring to be different (for being himself, as if he could ever be anything else.)
The fact that he made up the sociopath diagnosis himself is new to John, but not entirely surprising. Just a young boy trying to understand himself, and then hiding behind his new found armour for the rest of his life until gradually, he absorbed it and it became part of his skin.
“He hated most people, as I’m sure you know, but children always fascinated him. He loved them.” Celeste pauses for a bite of scone. Mycroft busies himself with a cucumber sandwich. John cannot look at either of them.
Of course, they’re in this together. Mummy Holmes and her one remaining son, teaming up against the immovable force that is Doctor John Watson. He grips the tea cup tighter; says nothing.
Celeste’s eyes have gone over wistful, and she sighs as if recalling a dear memory tinged with pain.
“Tiny humans, he called them, but without the ingrained idiocy. Children are not yet programmed to see the world in 2D, he said to me once. They see everything, and they are not afraid of it because they are not yet aware that they ought to be. Children don’t care what the world thinks of them. He found them fascinating, and beyond that, he adored them. Always had, ever since he was young, and I don’t think that ever changed.”
John was hard pressed to believe that this entire exchange was not scripted, but he could not keep the image of Sherlock engaging in conversation with a child out of his mind. It’s true, he had never seen Sherlock anywhere near a child; he could very well imagine what Celeste was describing. They had no reason to lie to him.
But now it is Mycroft’s turn to speak. John finds himself listening raptly despite his best efforts to focus on his scone. “The point, John, is to dispel any misguided concern you may harbour about Sherlock’s potential feelings regarding creating a child of his own. He had, I believe, given up the idea of ever having children but that was due largely to his own self-awareness - he believed he would be a terrible father, and he certainly never thought he’d find a partner to have one with - and his sexuality than disliking the idea in and of itself.”
“I see,” John says, though he’s not sure he actually does.
They are silent a few minutes before Mycroft speaks again. “I have taken the liberty of discussing the matter with your sister and she has agreed to provide the other, ahem, necessary ingredient, should you choose to take me up on the offer. A surrogate will be found and the entire process will be dealt with by the best doctors money can buy.”
Once more, John nods because he does not know what else to do. He stares at his plate, wishing they would stop staring at him, wishing he could just disappear and forget this entire day ever happened, wishing he could go back in time and never let Sherlock out of his sight on that horrible horrible day.
I wish, I wish, I wish.
Be careful what you wish for, John Watson, you might just get it.
Later, in his room - (Sherlock’s bedroom, periwinkle blue silk sheets on a four posted mahogany bed, deep blue velvet curtains pulled against the world, the crackle of a fire in the grate. Sherlock, laying here, china skin against perfect pale blue sheets, a halo of dark brown curls and eyes suddenly so blue that John’s breath caught in his chest; Sherlock, a wild, caged animal, finally set free in his own habitat, more noble and majestic than anything John had ever, has ever, seen; Sherlock laying underneath him and arching into John’s palm on his chest and saying I love you, John, I love you for the first time two weeks after they’re married, as if somehow being here, pale as freshly fallen snow against periwinkle blue silk, had opened the floodgates and unhinged his tongue and John had not needed to hear him say the words to know they were true, but had drunk them in anyways, had fallen on Sherlock’s mouth and drunk the words from his lips like a man in a desert that has just stumbled across a stream; Sherlock, holding John afterwards, pressing his head into his chest and whispering into his hair, saying nothing and everything all at once; Sherlock.) - Later, in Sherlock’s room, John sits down on the bed and holds his head in his hands and tries to push his thoughts back inside his skull.
His thoughts. His thoughts are a mess. He hates this room and he hates these sheets and he hates Mycroft and most of all he hates Sherlock for leaving him behind. John Watson, crippled and useless and alone once more.
You don’t have to be alone. Mycroft’s voice in his head. You don’t have to be alone, I can give you this, please let me give you this, Sherlock would not want you to be alone, Sherlock would understand. You’re my brother now, let me help you, John.
John closes his eyes and lets himself imagine: A tiny bundle of life in his arms, the potential of Sherlock’s DNA (and his, yes - well, actually, Harry’s DNA but the same in principal) - the potential of these two things mixing together and creating life, realised in his arms. Sherlock’s eyes staring out at him from a tiny porcelain face.
(No guarantee though. That’s the thing with babies. You never know who’s bits will show where. What if it’s just a tiny Harry in his arms? What if it bears no resemblance to Sherlock at all? Would that matter? No, no, John Watson, you cannot think about this. You cannot do this.)
But - what if? What if he did?
DNA mixing and mutations, that’s all babies are. No telling what they’ll come out like, but the building blocks are there, they’re all there: the potential for a tiny version of Sherlock in his arms again.
A living, breathing piece of Sherlock Holmes. (For that’s where this child would have come from. He does not think, he desperately does not think of a teenaged Sherlock sitting on this bed, collecting his own semen samples for posterity. But of course that’s what Sherlock, mad bastard, would have done. Once a year from the age of 14; sat on this bed and stripped off naked and wanked into a collection jar. Probably intending to preserve his own DNA in case human cloning ever did become a possibility; the mad, vain bastard, who hated himself and thought himself the culmination of human evolution with every single breath.)
John has never harboured any particular need to be a father but the idea does not put him off, not in and of itself. If what Mycroft and Celeste said to him about Sherlock’s love for children was true, maybe he would have become one in due course. He’s not young anymore, not by halves, but he is not yet 40 and he has heard of older parents in his life. He would have given Sherlock anything he’d asked for; would Sherlock have asked for this? Would Sherlock have given up their lifestyle (the puzzles, the chasing, the death-defying feats on a biweekly basis) for a child?
There is no answer to be found. John will never know. Sherlock has left him alone and now this choice, which he never thought he would have, is John’s and John’s alone.
When Mycroft first opened the freezer and John first understood what his proposition was, he thought he could dismiss it out of hand as just plain sick - but the more it sits in his head the more he cannot shake it free.
He does not want to make this choice. He does not want to be in this position at all.
More than anything, he does not want to be alone anymore.
I wish, I wish, I wish.
John falls asleep on top of the bedspread, but not before silent tears stain a patch of indigo into pristine blue pillow cases.
Breakfast the next morning is solemn. Mycroft appears not to have slept - “State business,” he says perfunctorily in response to his mother’s questions. “Unavoidable. Dreadful affair in Sierra Leone.” - and Celeste is looking increasingly wary. John picks at his food and wishes he could ignore their concerned glances.
He will never escape their watchful eyes. Mycroft has surely taken Sherlock’s surveillance routine and applied it to John. Celeste no doubt has a handful of cronies left over from the Cold War, owing her favours that she is at this very minute calling in: “Doctor John Watson, formerly of the RAMC. Watch him. Keep him safe. Keep him alive.”
John will never escape their concern because he threw his lot in with Sherlock, married him, and became (for all intents and purposes, if not in actual name) a Holmes, and the Holmeses look after their own.
He understands now what it must have been like for Sherlock, already so uncomfortable in his own skin, to feel their eyes on him with every step he made.
They seem to have decided for him - they seem to think this is his only logical course of action.
It is both insulting and touching in a way that only a Holmes could pull off. Insulting that they think they know what’s best for John; touching because they seem to care enough to take time out of their no doubt busy lives to make John understand.
John is not blind to himself; he is, in fact, stunningly self aware. He knows he is drowning. He knows that soon, he will be lost. The question is, whether that should matter to them or not.
Should it matter if John Watson dies to anyone other than John Watson? Why should he keep fighting? He believes that Mycroft and Celeste care about him but he does not necessarily believe that it is due to his own merits alone: this is something they are doing for Sherlock, caring for John Watson. So maybe he owes it to Sherlock, who died to keep him alive, to stay that way.
If he owes it to Sherlock to stay alive, maybe he owes it to Sherlock to be happy; does that include carrying on Sherlock’s DNA? Is that not some kind of base human instinct: to mix one’s genes with one’s partner’s genes and thus perpetuate themselves even when they are gone?
There are no good answers to these questions. John is making a decision that usually involves two people alone, in a house that is full of the ghost of his dead partner, and he hates Mycroft for making him do this here, now, like this.
Ultimately, John knows he cannot resist for long. He is delaying things by pushing scrambled eggs around his plate but ultimately, this decision must be made and it must be made by him.
Of course, the decision was made the second John saw Sherlock’s handwriting scrawled across those test tubes and understood what Mycroft was offering him.
It is common knowledge that John cannot, has never been able to, resist any part of Sherlock Holmes. Sherlock knew this, thought it was delightful and perplexing and ever so lucky; Mycroft knows it, thinks it tragic and maudlin and slightly amusing; Celeste certainly knows it, though John is unsure what she thinks of it. John knows it with every atom of his being and even though he hates it, he knows he is powerless against it.
So finally, finally, John looks up from his eggs (now cold) and stares at Mycroft in his smug face (one two many cakes, Mycroft, you’re getting fat again, how can you bear to eat knowing he’s gone, how?) and says, with the calm and confident voice of a soldier facing the enemy, “Okay.”
Mycroft’s face does not betray his joy at getting his way, only the way he grips his cup slightly harder than is necessary gives it away. Celeste smiles at John tremulously, as if she wants to hug him but is too proper even to consider it, and John wonders what on earth he’s just gotten himself into.
(A lifetime of looking after someone else. A tiny version of Sherlock to love and protect and care for. A Holmes-Watson production.)
Mycroft’s hand finds his shoulder and squeezes it, gently; it is the only sign of affection John has ever had from his brother-in-law. It stings with approval and understanding and John closes his eyes, puts his head in his hands, and struggles not to cry.
Author: 1electricpiratexkeijukainenx
Rating: M
Pairing: Sherlock Holmes/John Watson (BBC)
Summary: After Reichenbach and in order to 1) Keep Sherlock alive, 2) Keep John alive and 3) Get Sherlock home to England as soon as possible, Mycroft devises a plan that will not only incentivise John's continued sanity and survival but force Sherlock to come running. It is a perfect plan, though perhaps less than ethically sound. He has no doubts that using frozen samples of your younger brother's sperm to create children for his husband to care for falls deeply within the realm of socially unacceptable behaviour, but it is efficient, and that is what matters most.
Author's Notes: It has been said that it takes a village to raise a baby and this story is no exception. I've lost track of the number of people who have coaxed and egged and cheered me through this. Special mention goes to Dylan, Carly, and the Other Skanks (you know who you are) without whom this would still be a particularly annoying and slightly disturbing idea at the back of my mind. So thanks for that, you mentalists.
The story is planned out to completion and is nearly 3/4 written, so have no fear that it will cease to update event though it says it is unfinished. I have not used archive warnings but I believe I ought to mention that there are some rather questionable family-planning ethics at work here. If you're not down with alternative familial arrangements, probably you shouldn't read this. Also, this is an AU and I have not even *tried* to be true to the original canon timelines. You have been warned. The story has been beta'd rather thoroughly and any mistakes that remain are mine and mine alone.Disclaimer: I do not pretend to own any of these characters (besides the two or three I have conjured from thin air). Credit for that brilliance falls to ACD and the Godtiss.
Chapter One - The Limit Does Not Exist
It was Mycroft’s idea, originally.
John would never have, could never have thought of it on his own.
It was insane and sick and yet logical and touching in the way that only a Holmesian idea could be.
Sherlock would have approved of that aspect of the idea at least. But that wasn’t why John eventually said, “Yes, please. I’ll take you up on that, even though its the most bizarre thing I’ve ever heard of.”
In the end, John says yes because even though it is sick, and twisted, he can’t bear to exist in a world so completely devoid of any part of Sherlock Holmes but the body laying cold in freshly dug ground.
So John says “Yes, Mycroft, please,” and nine months later, he gets a call from St. Barts that has him running out the door with trepidation and yes, that is a little tinge of happiness, sitting heavy in his gut.
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Sherlock, for his part, should have seen it coming before it was too late. But of course Moriarty knows him too well, knew exactly which strings to pull to make him dance like a little paper-cut monkey.
It is humiliating and what’s more, it is tragic.
The words go around and around in his head as he climbs the stairs to the roof of St. Barts. I will burn the heart out of you.
Three bullets; three people. His heart, in three pieces, spread across London (an attempt to hide it, backfired, only made it easier to target). He cannot bear the thought of Mrs. Hudson and Lestrade hurt on his behalf, but he imagines he would survive their deaths.
But not John’s. Never John. And there it is, the crux of the matter. Moriarty has made a mistake but it is not big enough, not significant enough to count; the end result is the same. Sherlock’s heart is in three pieces spread across London but his soul is in the hands of John Watson, MD.
At least, he prides himself, it is not out of selfish reasons (the need to survive - always rather low on his list of priorities, until lately, until certain promises whispered into the honey-gold skin at the back of John Watson’s knees) that he decides he will do anything to keep John alive. (For John’s death will kill him too, he is fully aware of that.) Sherlock does not want to keep John alive because he wants to keep himself alive. He wants to keep John alive because John is everything, everything that is good and right in the world, and because John deserves to live for his own merits. He wants to save John because he loves him as he has never loved any human being in his life.
He would die for John, but he does not think that John would want him to do that. So instead of dying for John, he jumps.
(Jumps? Is it jumping if you’re forced? He falls. He is pushed. He lets himself be pushed off the roof of St. Barts hospital by the bullet in Moriarty’s brain and as he falls he prays to every deity he has ever heard of that his mother knows what she’s talking about.)
Mummy does not disappoint and so Sherlock, in not dying for John, dies. He fades out of life as he knows it and England in general with one last longing glimpse at the man he has just killed himself (in effigy) to protect and goes about doing just that: protecting him.
One day, he will be back. One day, he will explain. He lives for the day he sees John’s face again. He knows John might hate him, might punch him, might never talk to him again, but it is worth it to know that John is alive, and safe, and not being put in danger because he made the foolish mistake of falling in love with Sherlock Holmes.
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It takes Mycroft three weeks to work it out.
When he finally realises what has happened, what Sherlock has done, what he is doing, Mycroft sits back in his chair and closes his eyes and stays that way for a good half hour, until Madeline (yesterday she was Olivia) tells him he has an urgent call on the line from the President of the Ukraine.
He will hand it to his younger brother - just this once, he has really outdone himself.
Of course, Mummy must have been in on it. A worldwide hunting spree, a faked death, a corpse of questionable origin masquerading as Sherlock Holmes at the foot of a stark, plain tombstone? The entire thing reeks of her particular brand of outdated espionage. It’s base, Cold War-level trickery worthy of a Le Carré novel, and not much beyond that. Mycroft sneers despite himself: the entire thing is vulgar and pedestrian and shot with so many flaws that Mycroft cannot believe his own mother and brother thought it up.
And yet, it appears to have worked. It certainly worked on him for long enough to get Sherlock well out of the country; it is definitely working on John.
The thought of John is an uncomfortable one. Mycroft genuinely likes his brother-in-law, but John (quite rightfully) has never trusted him. Of course, he does not understand that once a Holmes (even if you do not take the name), always a Holmes, and that the Holmeses always take care of themselves first.
No, Sherlock would never have bothered to explain that particular family quirk to his husband. It would never have crossed his mind; as was patently obvious by this particular stunt. Why he’d thought Mummy a better option than his big brother, Mycroft would perhaps never understand.
The crisis in the Ukraine dealt with, Mycroft returns to the problem at hand: namely, keeping both of his brothers alive and sane until such a time as they could be safely reunited.
Sherlock, despite his own inherent hint of madness, is actually the least of his concerns. Sherlock has had, from a very young age, the best training money can buy in combat, survival, and escape. He is not, in fact, suicidal and Mycroft has great faith that he will do everything in his power to get back, in some shape or form, to John as quickly as he can.
Mycroft also knows that nothing, but nothing would make Sherlock do something this idiotic except for a direct, deadly and inescapable threat to John Watson. No, Mycroft is quite sure that when Sherlock made his decisions, he made them quickly, desperate to find a way to keep himself and his doctor alive.
The poor boy can be so dreadfully simple-minded sometimes, Mycroft thinks as he sighs, and turns his thoughts instead to the surprisingly quixotic and difficult puzzle that is John Watson.
John has all but dropped off the radar since the funeral - which means, of course, he is not doing anything. Anything at all. He is staying with his sister (the drunk lesbian, Mycroft recalls, a hint of disdain seeping into his otherwise irreproachable thoughts) and he seems to do nothing but sit on the settee and watch so much terrible TV Mycroft is almost surprised the poor man hasn’t taken drastic action against the TV set.
Every night at 7:30 John checks his phone, grimaces and throws it at the couch. Mycroft wonders if his brother was clever enough to set up some sort of code, and then realizes that that is exactly what he had done and exactly what causes the horrible, haunted look of loathing and longing on John Watson’s face every day. (CCTV footage is not always quite so clear, but Mycroft is very good at knowing which cameras ought to be upgraded when.)
Mycroft has not known John long, but he knows him well enough to understand that John is sinking fast, and that soon he will flounder and he will drown, and that will be the end of John Watson (and, by default, the end of Sherlock Holmes).
So, Mycroft sets out his objectives clearly in his head:
1) Keep Sherlock alive. This has been Mycroft’s primary objective since the age of 14 and is not liable to change any time soon.
2) Keep John Watson alive and sane. This has direct relevance to Objective 1, as without John, Sherlock is sure to go ballistic and probably do Jim’s men a favour and off himself.
3) (Which has direct relevance to the success of Objectives 1 & 2) Get Sherlock home at earliest convenience and allow ruthless trained killers to take over his endeavours (because really, Mycroft has been holding off ridding the world of Jim’s spider web until he could find appropriate justification; if only Sherlock had asked, they could have spared themselves this entire maudlin palaver.)
4) In order to succeed at Objectives 1 through 3, find some solution that will both incentivise John’s continued survival and sanity (without revealing to him the reality of what his husband has done, as John is without doubt the worst actor Mycroft has ever had the misfortune to see attempt to lie) and Sherlock’s speedy return to England.
A man named Occam once had a razor, and Mycroft has been his biggest fan since the age of five. The answer occurs to him, of course, in record time, as his eyes glide over a well-worn picture that he keeps in the top right hand corner of his desk.
The answer’s name is, against all odds, Rosie.
Pleased with himself, Mycroft sets about putting his plan into action.
Sherlock may be many things to many people, but one thing he is not is difficult to manipulate, especially if you know which buttons to press. Mycroft has made it a point, in his thirty-five years acquaintance with his younger brother, always to know which buttons to press.
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When John wakes up, he does not know where he is, until he feels the silk sheets beneath him and knows, instantly, that they will be periwinkle blue.
Eastwell Manor. Kent.
Mycroft.
John gasps for breath and jolts upwards in bed, taking in his surroundings. He is in Sherlock’s bedroom in his old home, surrounded by the things his husband loved as a child. For five minutes, John struggles to breathe, assaulted by memories of the last time he set foot in this room. They had been blissfully, stupidly happy; two weeks after their impromptu wedding, and John remembers that Sherlock had looked at him as if he held the sun and the stars in his hands. John remembers the way Sherlock’s ivory skin looked splayed out across periwinkle blue silk, arching into the gold-tinged skin of John’s fingers. John remembers the way it felt to have Sherlock look him in the eyes and say to his face that he loved him for the first time.
John remembers all these things with the clarity of cut crystal, but he does not remember meeting with Mycroft last night. It must have happened; Mycroft had been bugging him to meet with him for weeks, the insufferable bastard. Just like him to capture a bloke when he’s drunk and defenceless.
He decides abruptly that he cannot be in this room a single moment longer and extracts himself from the sheets as quickly as he can. His limp is coming back and he hates it, but for now he can still manage without a cane. The suit that is laid out for him on a rickety wooden chair is immaculate, but obviously made from the measurements taken for John’s wedding reception suit; he’s lost weight since then, the shirt hangs from his shoulders awkwardly and he has to tighten the belt quite tight to keep the trousers on his hips.
The manor is still, seemingly, asleep, as John picks his way through vaguely familiar hallways towards the breakfast room. (He remembers Sherlock’s vague look of disdain as he explained to John that yes, they did have separate rooms for eating each meal. In fact, they had two lunch rooms and several rooms dedicated to dinner, depending on the weather and type of company being kept.) A spasm of pain shoots through his leg and John has to stop, briefly, and lean against the wall until it passes.
Sherlock had been resplendent here, among all this subdued and understated grandeur. The Holmes family had surrounded themselves with the kind of splendour that spoke to being properly, anciently, filthily rich. They were not flashy, by and large, preferring to use their wealth to buy things of taste rather than opulence. Sherlock, who always seemed too cramped and folded up into awkward shapes in their small, cluttered flat in London, had stretched himself out and strode through these ridiculously beautiful halls with a magnificence that John had not been able to define or quantify. The only comparison to be made was that of a wild animal in its natural habitat: cooped up in a cage, it became awkward and ungainly; when allowed to roam free through it’s own habitat, it was noble and majestic.
Sherlock had hated the people and expectations that tended to come hand in hand with his upbringing, but John knew instantly that he loved Eastwell Manor in itself (as opposed to all the things it stood for) nearly as much as he loved London (and his love for London was boundless).
John, feeling the world swimming about him in an all-too-familiar way, sighs and pushes these thoughts from his mind. They don’t help, they never help; nothing can ever help that particular wound.
Sherlock is gone and John is left behind, as per usual, as was always inevitable, and there is nothing to do but soldier on.
John makes it to the breakfast room with the same sort of satisfaction he would have had in successfully navigating a minefield. He expects to find it empty, given the near-dead hush of the manor about him, but instead comes face to face with his head captor: his mother-in-law.
“John, darling.” Celeste Holmes’ voice is soft, and low, and tinged with the wisdom brought only by age and the acute intelligence she acquired, John is convinced, along with her last name. “Come, have some tea.”
He has met this woman twice before in his life; once at his wedding reception (an event which had occurred solely at her insistence) and once at her son’s funeral. She occupies a special place in John Watson’s heart - the woman that gave birth to both Mycroft and Sherlock Holmes deserves some sort of national recognition, John feels. Beyond that, she is the only person that he has ever seen Sherlock defer to for advice - meaning she is very, very clever indeed.
Not to mention, she is utterly charming, surprisingly witty and deviously cheeky. She is, in John’s eyes, perfect, and John hates himself for hating her as she sits across from him and pours him a tea blend that must have cost the earth from a silver pot into a china cup so delicate John is loathe to touch it lest it break under his clumsy, Watsonian hands. (He remembers Sherlock’s hands, curled gracefully around the china cup, cradling it gently to his face. He remembers Sherlock’s fingers translucent white against the blue and bone china and the ache in his leg reaches his stomach and his chest and John cannot breathe with how much he misses the mad bastard he’d married, all those months ago.)
(Months, not years, months, this isn’t how it’s supposed to go, surely, this is all wrong.)
(It’s absurd, the way you look at my hands. Do you know you do that in public? - They’re lovely hands. I want them on me always. - Be careful what you wish for, John Watson, for you might just get it. I wish, I wish, I wish, John thinks, but it is never enough.)
“John?” Celeste is speaking to him; is watching him with Sherlock’s eyes over the top of the silver tea service. She is holding out a full plate with one steady hand; her fingers are stubbier than Sherlock’s, and the illusion shatters blissfully and John can breathe once again.
“Thanks,” he mumbles. The look Celeste is giving him reeks of pity but John does not, cannot register it. He focuses on his eggs and does not think about how Sherlock’s eyes are looking at him out of someone else’s face.
“Darling, you don’t look at all well. To be expected, of course, but I wish you’d eat more often.”
John tips his head, an acknowledgement of her concern, a notice of his disgruntlement at being forced into her presence in the first place.
“Mycroft telephoned me last night; said he’d found you passed out in the gutter somewhere. I suggested he bring you here, and we alerted your sister, of course.”
“Oh,” John says. He drinks tea. A scone sits in his other hand, trembling like a leaf. He has never felt more British and less glad of it.
“Mycroft also said I was to tell you he’ll be back later to check in on you. Some terrible to do about gas lines in eastern Poland. He does get into such a fluster about the most ridiculous of problems.” Celeste’s smile is that of a doting mother, but her eyes are cold and calculated, the eyes of a solider, of a scientist, of a killer, of a spy. They are Sherlock’s eyes and John wants, for a horrible split second, to gouge them out of her head with his fingernails and then maybe eat them so he could both own them totally and never have to see them again.
“I should get back to London,” he says, lamely. There is no way they will let him go now they’ve got him, but he feels he ought at least to try to escape.
“I won’t hear of it, John, not until we get some meat back on that body. You’re family, now, and we look after our family.” She smiles the same smile at him (lips warm, eyes cold; don’t cross me, John Watson - the great Mycroft and Sherlock Holmes are but quivering boys underneath my gaze. Know your place. Pick your battles. Don’t make this more difficult than it already is).
John nods, accepts defeat, and forces himself to swallow a bite of the scone.
The manor grounds are humble, John supposes, as these sorts of things go. He harbours a very secret penchant for dramatic adaptations of Jane Austen novels and in comparison to the houses featured there, he reckons that Eastwell Manor is modest but respectable. Just like the rest of the family. It’s facade is imposing but charming, covered as it is with ivy (currently ranging in colour from scarlet to gold, a delightful burst of colour against the almost exhausting wash of green that are the grounds.)
John wanders the grounds for most of the day, discovering the old gatehouse as he goes, and nearly tripping over what seems to be a Par 4 hole in a very well-hidden golf course.
It is September and Sherlock has been dead for two months. John knows this, has always known it, but he did not really believe it until yesterday, when he found the note inside the skull when he was cleaning out the flat.
“My dearest John. I will leave this for you to find in case my plan goes awry. You are my heart, John, and I will not let him hurt you. I will not let him burn you. You are my heart, and he cannot touch you, not while I have breath in my body to stop him.
You were fantastic. We were fantastic. I will love you with every atom in my being until I am nothing but dust.
I remain yours, faithfully and until we both shall die,
-Sherlock Holmes”
John had read the letter once, twice, five times and then thrown the skull in his hands at the wall. It did not have the decency to shatter but merely clattered to the floor, rolling there indolently as John fell to his knees and cried as if the tears could rip his heart out and stop it hurting quite so badly.
Then, crying over, he had gone to the pub.
The last thing he remembered was Greg’s kind, pitying smile, the twist of his wedding band around his left finger and the taste of neat whiskey.
Greg must have called Mycroft. Devious bastards, always teaming up against them. Against him. There is no more them. There is no more us. There is just John Watson, alone against the world once more. Surely this is not how it was meant to go.
His leg is aching. He walked miles and never left the Holmes estate, and he has eaten nothing but half a scone and a cup of tea all day. It is half past five and yet night threatens to fall (the nights are drawing in, closer and closer, and John is violently reminded that this is Sherlock’s favourite time of the year) as he clambers up the stairs and into the manor proper.
Mycroft is waiting for him in Sherlock’s quarters. He has placed himself in one of the overstuffed armchairs, though he does have the decency, at least, to have left Sherlock’s things just as he found them.
“Ah. John. We were just about to call out the search party.”
“Mycroft.” John nods, crossing awkwardly to the settee nearest the fire and putting his leg gingerly up on the foot rest. “Care to explain your little kidnapping heist?”
“Detective Inspector Lestrade and I agreed it might be best to bring you here to Mummy instead of letting you return to your sisters. We rather thought she could do without the sight of her baby brother passed out on the floor and covered in traces of his own vomit.”
John winces at the words but he does not let them phase him.
“You’ve no right to kidnap me, Mycroft,” he snips waspishly at his brother-in-law, refusing to look at him.
“And you’ve no right to drink yourself into an early grave,” Mycroft snaps back. “I promised Sherlock a long time ago that if anything happened to him I would look after you and I do not intend to break that promise by watching you drink yourself dead.”
“Fuck you,” John growls, but there is no real heat in it. He is as trapped here now as Sherlock had been as a child. I wish, I wish, I wish; the refrain plays over and over in his head and he closes his eyes in order to focus more energy on the words.
“John, I have a proposition for you.”
“I don’t want to hear it, Mycroft.”
Mycroft smiles at him, the simpering smile John is sure he uses on all sorts of difficult diplomats right before laying down some kind of K.O. shot to their best laid plans. Never let it be said that Mycroft Holmes is not one of the most terrifying men in Britain. John sighs and slumps, defeated before he even begins to fight.
“Quite,” Mycroft says, heaving himself out of the chair. John resists the temptation to make a quip about too much cake. Needling Mycroft about his weight is firmly in Sherlock’s area of jurisdiction. John is not quite ready to encroach upon it just yet.
Mycroft leads John to a hidden door behind a tapestry in Sherlock’s bedroom, through the rather large library it opens onto and through yet another hidden door into the kind of laboratory that would not be out of place in some kind of Sci-Fi movie.
“Father’s old lab,” Mycroft explains, obviously noticing John’s slightly bewildered face. “Mummy gave Sherlock free reign in here after he nearly burned down the east wing for the second time.”
John barely has time to wonder what they are doing here before Mycroft leads him to an enormous stainless steel refrigerator and gestures at a lab stool for John to sit on.
Mycroft waits, pointedly, for him to sit down before continuing. The Holmes brothers - never above a bit of drama. John obliges, because he wants to get out of this room that seems to be full of the ghost of Sherlock. John has never seen Sherlock here but he can imagine him, as a child or perhaps a lanky, precocious teenager, running all sorts of experiments on door mice and butterflies and bits of roadkill. The cool blue-tinged lighting would have made him look like an alien, like he had that first day in Barts when Stamford had stood by and smirked, pleased with himself, not knowing what it was he’d just done to both of them.
John’s chest hurts.
“Excellent. Now. First my proposition, and then explanations. I want you to think about it, John, and think about it properly. You and I both know that neither of us have a perfect moral compass, though I daresay yours is a sight better than mine, but I hope you won’t deem it necessary insult me with the artificial concerns for overly-developed ethics that the general population seems to find so tediously necessary.”
John raises a single eyebrow and crosses his arms across his chest. He says nothing. Mycroft continues.
“You are alone, now, and you are drifting. You find it difficult to understand the point of carrying on without Sherlock, at least some part of him, by your side. Eventually, you will give up. I am loathe to sit by and watch that happen to the only brother I have left. So, here is my proposition to you.”
With a flourish, the freezer door opens and John is suddenly glad he is sitting down.
There are rows upon rows of test tubes and containers, filling the freezer near to bursting. Each one is labelled in Sherlock’s spiked scrawl (attempting to be neat and methodical but never quite patient enough). There are pieces of bird beaks and the slime of a single slug; butterfly wings and the spleen of a rat. But John knows these are not the things Mycroft wants him to see, and he finds that he cannot breathe.
At the top of freezer is a small shelf, just high enough to fit a test tube in. There are twenty of them there, side by side, each one labelled meticulously.
Sherlock Holmes, they read. Then an age. A date. Several other numbers which John realises with the dawning sense of horror are pH readings, protein content, sperm counts.
It takes John all of two minutes to realise what, exactly, it is that Mycroft is suggesting.
“Jesus Christ,” he murmurs. His hand covers his mouth, then his eyes. He cannot look at the man who is standing there so cooly suggesting that he, for all intents and purposes, clone his dead husband. (Can’t clone humans, wouldn’t be a clone, a baby, a child, half-Sherlock half-some other person, some woman, but still half-Sherlock, a part of Sherlock alive and kicking, a part of Sherlock he could hold in his arms and never let go.)
Steadying breaths. Deep, steadying breaths. The freezer door closes; John lets his hand fall from his face, his eyes thunderous when he looks at his brother-in-law. “You... That’s... There are no words for how wrong that is. You’re ... God, bloody insane, the lot of you.”
“Is it so wrong?” Mycroft is indulging him, playing along with his resistance. “I wonder. Ethics, Doctor Watson, make for a rather sticky subject, don’t you think? Is it so wrong to create a child for yourself? How is it more wrong for you, a responsible, caring, loving person, to ... commission as it were, a child, than some 16 year-old who is attempting to secure housing benefits? Or, perhaps you are suggesting you are less worthy of having a child by the person you love than is a mother who in fact hates children and will abuse it for the rest of it’s life?” Mycroft hums softly under his breath. “I anticipated your initial disgust at the idea, John, but I also hope you see that your concern is largely unfounded.”
John is struggling to breathe.
His mind races. “I can’t just... I can’t just conjure up a child because I’m mourning my dead husband. Because I’m lonely. I couldn’t... That’s not... This is a whole life you’re talking about, Mycroft, an actual human life!”
“Oh come now, John, please don’t insult me. I know full well what I am talking about. Of course, it’s not just one human life we’re talking about, John, it’s two. A potential child’s, yes, but also yours.” Mycroft smiles at him, still indulgent, still patient, and John wants to rip his face off with his bare hands.
John shakes his head, speechless. There are no words to say. Even if there were, John wouldn’t know how to say them. This is the most preposterous thing he has ever heard of. Surely this is not happening to him. Surely this is some sort of nightmare. Surely he can’t actually be thinking about this as if it were a plausible option.
Mycroft waits and watches, lets the reality of his proposition sink in, before clearing his throat and breaking into the maelstrom of thoughts in John’s head. “Mummy will be wondering where we are, I’m afraid. Come John. Let’s have tea, and you can think about it some more.”
John nods and follows - because what else is he going to do?
They take tea in the winter garden, a charming room right out of a Better Homes and Gardens spread, painted in a delicious warm yellow and decorated with white garden furniture, pots overflowing with delicate and expensive greenery - flowers, ferns, what looks like a tiny orange tree. The sun is setting across the grounds and the room is lit from above by hanging glass lanterns. They would have been gas, once, but now the warm glow of electricity tricks John into feeling as if the room has trapped the sunlight and refused to let it go.
Celeste is dazzling in a deep blue dress suit, hair pulled into a loose bun at the back of her head, not a single strand out of place. There is a simple black brooch pinned at her breast, the only nod to mourning her dead son in the entire ensemble. John is deliriously grateful that she is not wearing black. He could not have borne it. She is pouring tea from a bone china tea pot, probably hand painted with those delicate blue patterns somewhere in China hundreds of years ago, John thinks. He does not think about Sherlock’s fingers curling around the cups. He will not let himself.
“I see Mycroft has informed you of his little plan,” Celeste says, without further ado, and John slides into the white wicker chair across from her, not even bothering to nod his acknowledgement. “Tea, dear.” John accepts the tea (he is powerless, here, to refuse anything they tell him to do; he wonders vaguely how he got to be here) and sips at it carefully. Just the right amount of sugar. Damn her. “And Pierre has simply outdone himself on the scones this afternoon. I insist you try one.”
The scone is as light as air; John smothers it in cream and jam and eats it despite himself while Celeste and Mycroft look on in thinly veiled approval. It occurs to John that they were not kidding when they meant he was part of their family now. It is clear they have adopted him, and that he has no say in the matter.
Sherlock would have hated it. John would be inclined to agree.
Sherlock. Sherlock would have scoffed at this whole ordeal. He would have called Mycroft all the names under the sun for being such an interfering bastard; he would have glared at his mother over the table and refused even the tiniest bite of these (heavenly) scones. He would have huffed off in a billow of coat tails and gone to curl up on one of the couches in the sitting room (Regency era chaise longue, darling, bit ratty around the edges but it does wonders for my back) and made sure that the entire house (and all of Kent, for that matter) was aware that he was sulking.
“Wrong,” Mycroft intones, breaking into his thoughts. Celeste is busying herself pouring more tea into John’s cup (the first has gone cold. How long had be been thinking about Sherlock’s body thrown in angry lines across that delicious mint green chaise longue? Long enough to be getting on with.) “If you’ll forgive me for stating the obvious, Doctor Watson, we have known Sherlock much longer than you have, and I can tell you that what you’re thinking right now is wrong.”
“Pardon?” John makes a big deal of sipping from his tea; it scalds his tongue. His entire body is somehow aching. He just wants to go to sleep and never wake up.
“Sherlock was always a funny thing,” Celeste says, as if responding to a different conversation. Mycroft purses his lips; she ignores him. “Such a flighty child. We did try to calm him but he became so very defensive over the years. Partially my fault, of course, but mostly his own.”
John does not understand what they are talking about, so he drinks more tea. Takes another bite of his scone. Curses his own, very British inability to abandon stoicism in favour of causing a scene. It has never seemed quite so inconvenient until now.
“Once, at the age of eleven, he read a psychology text book and spent weeks telling anyone who would listen to him that he was a sociopath,” Celeste continues, in the tone of a young mother telling the story of the one time her dearest child had upset the sugar bowl. Such a silly duckling, her tone seemed to say. John knew better than to take any Holmesian tone of voice at face value, though. “Of course, he was no such thing. Never has been. But it was easier for him that way.”
John knows this already. Had deduced it himself within twelve hours of meeting the man. For all his prickles, for all his icy cold disdain, Sherlock was, at heart, a vulnerable, hurt child, tortured by the world at large in perpetuity for daring to be different (for being himself, as if he could ever be anything else.)
The fact that he made up the sociopath diagnosis himself is new to John, but not entirely surprising. Just a young boy trying to understand himself, and then hiding behind his new found armour for the rest of his life until gradually, he absorbed it and it became part of his skin.
“He hated most people, as I’m sure you know, but children always fascinated him. He loved them.” Celeste pauses for a bite of scone. Mycroft busies himself with a cucumber sandwich. John cannot look at either of them.
Of course, they’re in this together. Mummy Holmes and her one remaining son, teaming up against the immovable force that is Doctor John Watson. He grips the tea cup tighter; says nothing.
Celeste’s eyes have gone over wistful, and she sighs as if recalling a dear memory tinged with pain.
“Tiny humans, he called them, but without the ingrained idiocy. Children are not yet programmed to see the world in 2D, he said to me once. They see everything, and they are not afraid of it because they are not yet aware that they ought to be. Children don’t care what the world thinks of them. He found them fascinating, and beyond that, he adored them. Always had, ever since he was young, and I don’t think that ever changed.”
John was hard pressed to believe that this entire exchange was not scripted, but he could not keep the image of Sherlock engaging in conversation with a child out of his mind. It’s true, he had never seen Sherlock anywhere near a child; he could very well imagine what Celeste was describing. They had no reason to lie to him.
But now it is Mycroft’s turn to speak. John finds himself listening raptly despite his best efforts to focus on his scone. “The point, John, is to dispel any misguided concern you may harbour about Sherlock’s potential feelings regarding creating a child of his own. He had, I believe, given up the idea of ever having children but that was due largely to his own self-awareness - he believed he would be a terrible father, and he certainly never thought he’d find a partner to have one with - and his sexuality than disliking the idea in and of itself.”
“I see,” John says, though he’s not sure he actually does.
They are silent a few minutes before Mycroft speaks again. “I have taken the liberty of discussing the matter with your sister and she has agreed to provide the other, ahem, necessary ingredient, should you choose to take me up on the offer. A surrogate will be found and the entire process will be dealt with by the best doctors money can buy.”
Once more, John nods because he does not know what else to do. He stares at his plate, wishing they would stop staring at him, wishing he could just disappear and forget this entire day ever happened, wishing he could go back in time and never let Sherlock out of his sight on that horrible horrible day.
I wish, I wish, I wish.
Be careful what you wish for, John Watson, you might just get it.
Later, in his room - (Sherlock’s bedroom, periwinkle blue silk sheets on a four posted mahogany bed, deep blue velvet curtains pulled against the world, the crackle of a fire in the grate. Sherlock, laying here, china skin against perfect pale blue sheets, a halo of dark brown curls and eyes suddenly so blue that John’s breath caught in his chest; Sherlock, a wild, caged animal, finally set free in his own habitat, more noble and majestic than anything John had ever, has ever, seen; Sherlock laying underneath him and arching into John’s palm on his chest and saying I love you, John, I love you for the first time two weeks after they’re married, as if somehow being here, pale as freshly fallen snow against periwinkle blue silk, had opened the floodgates and unhinged his tongue and John had not needed to hear him say the words to know they were true, but had drunk them in anyways, had fallen on Sherlock’s mouth and drunk the words from his lips like a man in a desert that has just stumbled across a stream; Sherlock, holding John afterwards, pressing his head into his chest and whispering into his hair, saying nothing and everything all at once; Sherlock.) - Later, in Sherlock’s room, John sits down on the bed and holds his head in his hands and tries to push his thoughts back inside his skull.
His thoughts. His thoughts are a mess. He hates this room and he hates these sheets and he hates Mycroft and most of all he hates Sherlock for leaving him behind. John Watson, crippled and useless and alone once more.
You don’t have to be alone. Mycroft’s voice in his head. You don’t have to be alone, I can give you this, please let me give you this, Sherlock would not want you to be alone, Sherlock would understand. You’re my brother now, let me help you, John.
John closes his eyes and lets himself imagine: A tiny bundle of life in his arms, the potential of Sherlock’s DNA (and his, yes - well, actually, Harry’s DNA but the same in principal) - the potential of these two things mixing together and creating life, realised in his arms. Sherlock’s eyes staring out at him from a tiny porcelain face.
(No guarantee though. That’s the thing with babies. You never know who’s bits will show where. What if it’s just a tiny Harry in his arms? What if it bears no resemblance to Sherlock at all? Would that matter? No, no, John Watson, you cannot think about this. You cannot do this.)
But - what if? What if he did?
DNA mixing and mutations, that’s all babies are. No telling what they’ll come out like, but the building blocks are there, they’re all there: the potential for a tiny version of Sherlock in his arms again.
A living, breathing piece of Sherlock Holmes. (For that’s where this child would have come from. He does not think, he desperately does not think of a teenaged Sherlock sitting on this bed, collecting his own semen samples for posterity. But of course that’s what Sherlock, mad bastard, would have done. Once a year from the age of 14; sat on this bed and stripped off naked and wanked into a collection jar. Probably intending to preserve his own DNA in case human cloning ever did become a possibility; the mad, vain bastard, who hated himself and thought himself the culmination of human evolution with every single breath.)
John has never harboured any particular need to be a father but the idea does not put him off, not in and of itself. If what Mycroft and Celeste said to him about Sherlock’s love for children was true, maybe he would have become one in due course. He’s not young anymore, not by halves, but he is not yet 40 and he has heard of older parents in his life. He would have given Sherlock anything he’d asked for; would Sherlock have asked for this? Would Sherlock have given up their lifestyle (the puzzles, the chasing, the death-defying feats on a biweekly basis) for a child?
There is no answer to be found. John will never know. Sherlock has left him alone and now this choice, which he never thought he would have, is John’s and John’s alone.
When Mycroft first opened the freezer and John first understood what his proposition was, he thought he could dismiss it out of hand as just plain sick - but the more it sits in his head the more he cannot shake it free.
He does not want to make this choice. He does not want to be in this position at all.
More than anything, he does not want to be alone anymore.
I wish, I wish, I wish.
John falls asleep on top of the bedspread, but not before silent tears stain a patch of indigo into pristine blue pillow cases.
Breakfast the next morning is solemn. Mycroft appears not to have slept - “State business,” he says perfunctorily in response to his mother’s questions. “Unavoidable. Dreadful affair in Sierra Leone.” - and Celeste is looking increasingly wary. John picks at his food and wishes he could ignore their concerned glances.
He will never escape their watchful eyes. Mycroft has surely taken Sherlock’s surveillance routine and applied it to John. Celeste no doubt has a handful of cronies left over from the Cold War, owing her favours that she is at this very minute calling in: “Doctor John Watson, formerly of the RAMC. Watch him. Keep him safe. Keep him alive.”
John will never escape their concern because he threw his lot in with Sherlock, married him, and became (for all intents and purposes, if not in actual name) a Holmes, and the Holmeses look after their own.
He understands now what it must have been like for Sherlock, already so uncomfortable in his own skin, to feel their eyes on him with every step he made.
They seem to have decided for him - they seem to think this is his only logical course of action.
It is both insulting and touching in a way that only a Holmes could pull off. Insulting that they think they know what’s best for John; touching because they seem to care enough to take time out of their no doubt busy lives to make John understand.
John is not blind to himself; he is, in fact, stunningly self aware. He knows he is drowning. He knows that soon, he will be lost. The question is, whether that should matter to them or not.
Should it matter if John Watson dies to anyone other than John Watson? Why should he keep fighting? He believes that Mycroft and Celeste care about him but he does not necessarily believe that it is due to his own merits alone: this is something they are doing for Sherlock, caring for John Watson. So maybe he owes it to Sherlock, who died to keep him alive, to stay that way.
If he owes it to Sherlock to stay alive, maybe he owes it to Sherlock to be happy; does that include carrying on Sherlock’s DNA? Is that not some kind of base human instinct: to mix one’s genes with one’s partner’s genes and thus perpetuate themselves even when they are gone?
There are no good answers to these questions. John is making a decision that usually involves two people alone, in a house that is full of the ghost of his dead partner, and he hates Mycroft for making him do this here, now, like this.
Ultimately, John knows he cannot resist for long. He is delaying things by pushing scrambled eggs around his plate but ultimately, this decision must be made and it must be made by him.
Of course, the decision was made the second John saw Sherlock’s handwriting scrawled across those test tubes and understood what Mycroft was offering him.
It is common knowledge that John cannot, has never been able to, resist any part of Sherlock Holmes. Sherlock knew this, thought it was delightful and perplexing and ever so lucky; Mycroft knows it, thinks it tragic and maudlin and slightly amusing; Celeste certainly knows it, though John is unsure what she thinks of it. John knows it with every atom of his being and even though he hates it, he knows he is powerless against it.
So finally, finally, John looks up from his eggs (now cold) and stares at Mycroft in his smug face (one two many cakes, Mycroft, you’re getting fat again, how can you bear to eat knowing he’s gone, how?) and says, with the calm and confident voice of a soldier facing the enemy, “Okay.”
Mycroft’s face does not betray his joy at getting his way, only the way he grips his cup slightly harder than is necessary gives it away. Celeste smiles at John tremulously, as if she wants to hug him but is too proper even to consider it, and John wonders what on earth he’s just gotten himself into.
(A lifetime of looking after someone else. A tiny version of Sherlock to love and protect and care for. A Holmes-Watson production.)
Mycroft’s hand finds his shoulder and squeezes it, gently; it is the only sign of affection John has ever had from his brother-in-law. It stings with approval and understanding and John closes his eyes, puts his head in his hands, and struggles not to cry.