[fic] in theory this is the last in the series. in practice, Mycroft.

[apiphile]

Title: amare et sapere vix deo conceditur
Fandom: Sherlock (BBC)
Pairing/Characters: Mycroft/original character, mostly Gen though.
Warnings: Repeatedly depressing.
Disclaimer: BBC/ACD property. Research amounts to Wikipedia.


It was the sirens again. Mycroft knew they were coming before he heard them; bent over his desk, his tongue tucked against the inside of his cheek as he translated (amare et sapere vix deo conceditur), in his room.

Sherlock's room faced the road, and Sherlock's 3-year-old ears (to Mycroft's disquiet) were significantly keener than his.

Mycroft knew then that Mummy had called the ambulance for herself again because his brother set up a pained howl that could have shattered glass and which outstripped the sirens long before they arrived.

Any thought he might have had of blocking his ears with his shoulder and one hand or simply pretending that his smaller, unasked-for sibling was screeching like nails on a blackboard while he continued the work Mummy had set him evaporated at the sound of her voice.

She was hoarse, and weak, and yet her voice carried through the walls and over the encroaching sirens and even beyond the shrill complaints of an aggrieved toddler. Later, in years to come, Mycroft would develop this particular skill himself, but now, surrounded by distractions and overcome with the sudden urge to raid the fridge, Mycroft did not appreciate it.

"MYCROFT KEEP HIM QUIET I AM IN PAIN."

Her voice rattled through the whole of upstairs like a passing train. It wasn't that Mycroft doubted her, exactly - she took a lot of pills and hadn't been out of bed at all since Sherlock was born - but sometimes she just called the ambulance instead of taking the pills. He knew because he counted them.

Now that he could hear the sirens their wail and Sherlock's intertwined and made his ears ring. Mycroft pushed his chair back from his desk and crept into the hall as the sirens drew up on the house. Sherlock's howl of aural misery filled the upper reaches of the house like smoke, and Mummy's, "I SAID KEEP HIM QUIET," sliced through it like a knife.

Mycroft shoved open the door to Sherlock's room: he sat hunched up like a gargoyle at the foot of his bed, his hands pressed against his ears, his unsightly explosion of auburn curls puffed up between his fingers. His face was screwed up and red and he was making a noise like someone was repeatedly kicking a very angry cat.

"Shut up," Mycroft hissed into the room, standing on the threshold as if faced with a physical barrier. "Shut up, you're upsetting Mummy."

Sherlock, as Mycroft had known he would, ignored Mycroft entirely and carried on screaming.

Mycroft lunged into the room; Mummy was in pain, the ambulance men were coming, and if Sherlock was screeching his head off like a stuck pig when they switched off the sirens again they would call the police.

He tried to clap his hand over Sherlock's mouth - he was after all only a very little boy, and it should have been easy enough with Sherlock's hands lodged over his ears - but Sherlock stiffened as rigid as the floorboards of his room, screeched, "STOP TOUCHING ME!" in something akin to horror, and bit Mycroft in the hand hard enough to draw blood.

"SHUT UP," Mycroft snapped, whipping his hand away. The pain seemed to worsen when he caught sight of the bright red blood coming from his finger. "SHUT UP. YOU ARE UPSETTING MUMMY."

Reasoning with a three-year-old was probably not the brightest move; Mycroft put his bleeding finger in his mouth and bolted from the room; the sirens faded, and he stood uncertain in the doorway as paramedics took the stairs two at a time.

They ignored him, opening the door to Mummy's room, and Mycroft heard the patient exchange between uniformed man and bed-ridden mother. He knew it off by heart by now; Sherlock, in ecstasies of discomfort still, blurted, "LEAVE ME ALONE," as if the sudden invasion of the house were designed for the sole purpose of inconveniencing him.

"Shut up," Mycroft said, bracing himself in the doorway. One of the paramedics ran back down the stairs. "Shut up, shut up. You are making everything worse."

He dithered. Mummy would not want him in the bedroom, getting in the way. Mummy would want him here, on guard, keeping Sherlock in his room - although the likelihood of him coming out of it with strangers about was remote anyway - but Mycroft knew that the paramedics would try to move her, and then she would make that terrible sound, the one that went right through to his bones, and then Sherlock would certainly start screaming again.

The paramedic who had run down the stairs came back up with a third paramedic and a backboard. They were going to take her away again.

Mycroft waited for them to go past, and slipped out of the bedroom, down the corridor to the cupboard where the spare linen and packages of "replacements" were kept.

He took out a pair of Mummy's old indoor gloves; waiting for Mrs Hannity to take them to the charity shop, probably, although at present he didn't care why they were still around, only that they were. Mycroft bolted back into Sherlock's room, pulling the gloves onto his hands as he went.

"Better?" he asked his grizzling brother as he closed the bedroom door.

Sherlock looked at his hands and shook his head. "No don't touch me."

"I have to," Mycroft said, pulling Sherlock's immediately rigid-form against his chest and pressing his hand to the far side of Sherlock's head, squeezing his ear as close to shut as an ear could go. He slid his other hand over Sherlock's mouth, and closed his eyes. "I don't like it either."

Sherlock said nothing, which was entirely usual, but he didn't squirm, scream, or bite Mycroft in the hand again, which Mycroft believed was an infinite improvement. Mycroft squeezed his eyes shut more tightly - thought he already knew this would make the sound appear louder, not diminished - and pressed Sherlock's head against his ribs as Mummy made the involuntary sound of terrible, terrible pain.

He should have been paying attention to the clanking of the pipes, he realised afterwards (too late). Mycroft had only assumed that they were performing their regular cacophony in relation to Mrs Hannity’s arthritic attentions to the household laundry, but assumption - as he reminded himself nightly - was the forerunner to terrible mistakes.

The pipes in the bathroom rattled and shook, and the morning light squeezed through the high frosted window glass as if embarrassed to be in such raucous company; Mycroft undid the belt of his dressing-gown and stared at himself in the mirror. Human biology stated that by one’s twenties (which Mycroft considered himself to be in now, although his birthday was still a week away) one should begin some semblance of facial hair, but so far Mycroft’s had remained stubbornly limited to aggressive sideburns which were more properly plucked than shaved.

He turned to the lavatory, clenched his buttocks pre-emptively (for the preceding week had not been kind to his intestines) and relaxed his bladder.

The shower sputtered into life, and in the sudden hiss of falling water and the connection instantly drawn from it, Mycroft was unable to stop himself from giving a horrified yelp, a small start, and a brief burst of urine into the toilet.

“GET OUT,” Sherlock shouted, poking his head around the shower curtain. “I was in here first. Get out. Get out.”

While puberty had made little dent on Mycroft’s general physique, on Sherlock it had spent some effort in extending his already long face and bizarre features, and hallowed with morning hair he looked absurd and unnecessarily tall. Ordinarily Mycroft would have entertained some relief that they were growing less and less physically alike, in the hopes of one day being able to disclaim all relation to the troublesome pest and declare that “Holmes” was a very common surname, but it was eight in the morning and there was a naked fifteen-year-old less than six feet away. Mycroft’s brain was the envy of the college and a wonder of the logical world, but it did not function very well before coffee and he’d never found it operated at its best in the presence of other people’s nudity.

“You get out!” Mycroft barked, automatically. “I have to get to work, you’re just lying around the house all day getting on Mummy’s nerves -“ He stuffed his penis back into his pyjama bottoms as quickly as he could without … drips … and closed his dressing-gown in haste.

“I was in here first,” Sherlock repeated, with the affronted dignity of a boy who still clung grimly to the idea that there could, somehow, be a form of justice in the uncaring universe if only he was stubborn enough. “Why don’t you check before you come barging in here -“

“Well why don’t you lock the door?” Mycroft snapped, ramming his hands into his armpits as the shower whispered on unheeded, slowly flattening the back of Sherlock’s usually buoyant hair.

“Because the lock’s broken,” Sherlock said with maddening reasonableness.

“Then why not fix it?”

“Well why not check before you come in here by knocking like a human being?” Sherlock complained. The shower curtain, opaque when dry, was turning translucent as it stuck to his legs.

“Get out, I have to go to work,” Mycroft repeated, as something ominous in his lower abdomen threatened to inflict fresh suffering upon both him and his pyjama bottoms. Six weeks of menial admin work for Watchet council was not the high-flying parliamentary internship to which Mycroft felt he was entitled, but it was a paid position and, as he was beginning to discover, there was a great deal that could be done from a location of seeming insignificance. In fact, it was starting to dawn on him that finding a place on the ladder which generally escaped detection in parliamentary shake-ups was more likely to result in a permanent hand on the country’s tiller than having to attach himself to the wake of one or another of the giants who might be felled at any moment.

“Oh God your important job,” Sherlock sneered, but he disentangled himself from the shower curtain and - to Mycroft’s immediate distress - stepped out of the shower tray without reaching for a towel or indeed turning off the water. “Happy now?” he grumbled, stalking naked as a beast of the field past Mycroft with an expression of wounded pride and childish anger sketched across his ever-elongating face.

He slammed the bathroom door behind him.

Mycroft was rather less happy than he was acutely nauseated, and he struggled to pull down both the lavatory seat and his pyjama bottoms as quickly as he could. He flopped onto the lavatory seat and bent over his knees, plastering first one hand, then both, across his mouth as his guts began their morning rebellion and the shower’s song rose to a thunder without anyone under it.

In the end, he just took the money from the kitty and wrote it off as personal expenses. Everyone else was doing it. A thousand pounds wasn’t, in the grand scheme of things, a great deal of money, and it ensured a degree of discretion that mere loyalty or fear could buy. Even so, Mycroft took every possible precaution.

He used an agency known in Whitehall for its standards of discretion. He borrowed a colleague’s office (without, of course, notifying said colleague), and name. He had an anonymous message service leave the order. He specified a blindfold. He specified total silence.

There were other precautions to be taken: he acquired a cheap pair of imitation leather gloves (no point in wasting good money on something that would later be burned), and a well-regarded brand of condoms. He put a bottle of Hibiscrub in his bag and, after some deliberation on the matter, availed himself via a convoluted series of intermediaries and a drop box which was supposed to be used for confidential documents of a couple of sachets of water-based lubricant.

Under ordinary circumstances the preparation, planning, and meticulous perfection of discretion and circumstance would have left Mycroft with a sense of considerable satisfaction, but as he stood in silence behind the door of a darkened office he could detect only dread.

Mycroft abhorred the use of weapons by himself or on himself, naturally, although he was less concerned with having others mutilate people on his behalf as long as he didn't have to watch. He'd instructed the security team (again, via several intermediaries, observing the process to ensure against Chinese Whispers breaking out) to be thorough with anyone entering the building this week, and then crept in through the supply doors unnoticed this evening. There were occasional advantages to having grown up with a crime-obsessed sibling, and one was that Mycroft had become very, very adept at covering his tracks.

He had, therefore, nothing to fear from the visitor. Nothing to fear from his escort, who would not enter the room. Nothing to fear from it all, but his heart still betrayed him with nervous misbeatings until he began to feel quite ill.

He checked his watch a few more times, locked the screen on his phone, and stepped carefully into the deeper shadows behind the coat rack as a knock came on the door.

It came in bursts of rapid thumps, and was clearly being read off a card, which Mycroft did not appreciate at all; the agency's employees should be required to memorise and then forget, as field men at MI5. But the pattern was correct (on a whim, he had chosen Sherlock's birth date, backwards, in base eight), and Mycroft gave his much shorter answer.

The door opened: Mycroft waited as a young, slimmish male figure was thrust heavy-handedly into the room; in the dim light of the office, almost entirely illuminated by the weak glow of power-button diodes and the curtain-diffused orange lights of streetlamps on Aldgate, Mycroft could make out the blindfold, and that he was possibly Chinese.

The young man - to Mycroft's eye not much over twenty-one - stood in the nervous, splayed pose of one who is in an unfamiliar room which he cannot see, and whom despite having no doubt received his very precise instructions, fears assault.

Mycroft held his breath as he put on his gloves. His hands were not as steady as he would have liked; he noted with something approaching relief that the young man was already wearing the gloves that had been provided at the entrance, and with trepidation that the only easily-accessible place for him to sit was directly opposite the door.

He took the young man's wrist; he jumped, of course, but after the initial start and the increase in the young man's heart rate he made no further objection, and to Mycroft's approval didn't cry out or ask what was going on.

Mycroft led him to the edge of the table and left him to stand as positioned, as biddable as a jointed doll.

He lowered himself onto the edge of the desk. It was clear, tidy, clean, and took his weight well. Mycroft extracted the lubricant sachet from his breast pocket and placed it in the young man's gloved hands, along with the condoms, and sat back with his thights slightly parted. This, he had long since decided, would be the extent of his pro-activity. All else should be reaction, in ... innocence.

The confusion of the prostitute (Mycroft gave in and left the word lurking in his brain with all the revulsion it brought with it) was short-lived as it was exasperating; he had clearly been briefed, and he seemed enterprising enough about the business of extracting Mycroft's penis from his trousers. He even handled the more tricky business of swathing it in latex while gloved and blindfolded with aplomb, though Mycroft stopped short of giving a critical appraisal within his head: to do so would be to pay the matter more attention than anything so vulgar deserved.

He exhaled very slowly and with a series of jagged pauses when, water-based lubricant staining and spoiling his cheap imitation leather gloves, the prostitute encircled Mycroft's penis with one hand and began at last a slow and methodical pressure upon it.

Mycroft was not, despite contestation to the inverse by (among others) his brother, without a degree of self-awareness. He knew, for example, that people thought him pompous and conniving, which he cared little enough about. He knew with the corrosive certainty of hours of mirror-watching as a pubescent boy that he was ugly and that this was in the larger scheme of things immaterial.

He also knew that his already unhandsome face was prone to contorting into yet more hangdog features when faced with this kind of activity, which was the secondary reason for the blindfold.

The prostitute kept up a simple rhythm, twisting his wrist a quarter turn on every second stroke, and with the over-elegance of shoulder movement that said he was very aware of being watched. Mycroft turned his head away to stare into the shadows behind the door. He thought distractedly of concealed cameras, night-vision lenses, and heat-sensor triggers; he felt, despite this diversion, the muscles of his face pull into a rictus of sadness and disgust.

Mycroft felt the corner of his mouth begin to twitch on the right side. He tightened his grip on the desk, and the prostitute - perhaps feeling his change in weight distribution and believing it to be an indication of further arousal - picked up the pace of his ministrations. Mycroft tried to hold his breath, failed, and tried again.

This produced a series of truncated breaths that were almost, but not quite, gasps. Mycroft despised them. They matched almost exactly the crests of escalating waves moving through him, concentrating themselves below his skin like some sort of full-body sneeze.

Mycroft had never been tremendously fond of orgasm, but his body seemed to demand it as it demanded food; without his consent, control, or capability for doing anything but mitigate the aftereffects. It was disorienting: his body tensed, his face contorted, dragging his mouth into an ungainly fish-gape of despair. It was demeaning: the condom filled, overfilled, with what Mycroft had always judged to be an excessive and humiliating quantity of semen. There was trickle-back; there was contamination of his pubic hair with the stuff.

He sat still, and monitored his own heart rate while the prostitute reached uncertainly for the tip of the condom.

Mycroft pushed him away with the back of his left hand.

In time, he would remove the condom, throw the young man back out into the corridor to be removed by his escort, and apply vigorous quantities of Hibiscrub to his genitals until not a trace of the unhappy incident remained. But for now Mycroft must sit, and wait for his heart to slow, and wait for his mind to regain its equilibrium.

The summer was too hot, and though Mummy had forbidden the window be open any further than the second notch on the latch, Mycroft had opened it to the third and rolled his sheets into a ball at the end of the bed. The moon outside was a half-obscured flashlight drawing knife-edged shadows across the back lawns. Mycroft sprawled like a small sweaty starfish across his bed and waited without patience for his brain to stop ticking.

In Watchet, at night, the town should have been as quiet as an open grave but in the sticky armpit of summer it rang with drunken bickering outside every pub; Mycroft listened without interest to the blurred cacophony of swearwords and slurred threats that crept on the still, thick air up to Wyndham House. He tried to arrange himself on the bed, searching for whichever parts of the mattress he hadn't already warmed up by lying on them, but in vain.

Despite severe prohibition against getting up after lights out, Mycroft rolled himself to the edge of the bed and extended a cautious toe onto the floor. Mummy was a light sleeper. Sherlock purported to sleep like the dead but he had an uncanny ability to be awake whenever Mycroft was trying to sneak up on him.

Mycroft prowled across the bedroom floor to the window and poured himself over the sill; at least, he felt sure that was what he was doing, but when he bashed his elbow against the windowframe and was forced to bite his lips to keep in a squawk of pain, he had to acknowledge that he wasn't quite the graceful sneak he fondly imagined himself to be. There was even the possibility that the cruel characterisation of him as "walking with a stick up his arse" that his head teacher at primary school had offered to Mummy (via a letter Mycroft had to give her) was even a little accurate.

Nevertheless, he rolled up his pyjama sleeve, inspected his elbow for blood, and found nothing that would alert suspicion. Once this was out of the way, Mycroft hung his head out of the window and into what little there was in the way of breeze.

So preoccupied was Mycroft with the illicit cooling of summer sweats that he did not hear footsteps on the landing; perhaps he had not been listening for them, for Mrs Hannity did not sleep in the house. He only knew that the bedroom door opened without warning, and that he nearly fell out of the window.

Once Mycroft had slightly recovered his balance, if not his demeanour, he squinted at the miniature silhouette in the doorway of his bedroom. There was clearly something amiss: leaving one's bedroom was even more strictly prohibited than being out of bed after lights out, and for all his five-year-old brother's incursions into Mummy's patience and lack of proper regard for the rules, he wasn't that enamoured of pushing his luck.

"What?" Mycroft whispered, reluctant to peel himself away from the window and the comfort it offered.

"Not well," Sherlock said, swaying gently in bare feet. It was then that the smell, sickly-sweet and sour at once, reached Mycroft's rather delicate nose and nearly made him retch.

He remembered, decades later, that Sherlock very specifically never said "I don't feel well" but simply "I am not well". One had to be certain of things, in Wyndham House.

Mycroft turned his face to the window to inhale air that didn't smell so pungently of his brother's vomit. "What do you think I'm going to do?" He said it aloud, but he meant, What would Mummy tell me to do?

Mummy would tell Sherlock to go back to bed. She would tell Sherlock, 'You're not well? I have been confined to this room for the last six years because of you,' and Mycroft could imagine precisely the intonation because he'd heard it often enough before.

"Going to sleep in the bath," Sherlock mumbled, evidently still queasy.

"What do you want me to do about it?" Mycroft hissed. The windowsill was uncomfortable, but the smell of sick in the little bathroom would be unbearable. He slapped his conscience down forcefully.

Mummy would be disappointed.

"God," Mycroft said under his breath, but Sherlock had already retreated. He crept across to the door, and with the softest tread of which he was capable, inched his way down the stairs to Mrs Hannity's cupboard under the staircase.

He picked up the pale blue bucket with the bottle of Dettol and the packet of Marigolds in it, and with even more tentative steps re-ascended to the bathroom.

When he entered, Sherlock stood in the bath-tub desolutorily soaking the front of his pyjamas with the detachable shower head. The next year they would have the bath taken out and replaced with a "real shower" in line with some plan of Mummy's that she never divulged, and this moment in the dim summer night's light was one of the last memories that Mycroft had of the old bath.

He thrust the bucket, missing the Marigolds, at Sherlock. The Dettol bottle rattled against the pale blue plastic; Mycroft removed a pair of pink marigolds from their packaging and put them on, where they slopped uncomfortably about his much smaller hands.

"You look ridiculous," Sherlock said, standing beside a bucket of slowly-diluting disinfectant with a sick-streaked pyjama shirt and the wildest, most feral hair ever seen on a five-year-old boy.

"You look disgusting," Mycroft countered, pulling the Marigolds up.

For a moment they only regarded each other across the gulf of five years, Mycroft barefoot on the polished floorboards with his pink Marigolds and his pyjama shirt sticking to his back with sweat and Sherlock spattered with his own bile as he filled a bucket in which to soak his pyjamas. The moon came directly in through the half-open window, along with several tiny flies, presumably attracted by the stench of sickness.

Mycroft was struck then by a thought which caused him almost as much discomfort as this brief imprisonment in olfactory hell:

Without me, he thought, as Sherlock clumsily turned off the cold tap, she would destroy you.

He bundled the thought up in a protective layer of cynicism, and promised he would never let it darken his mind again.