Sherlock fic: Intervention
After weeks of radio silence (we can blame job searching) I am emerging to share my very first Sherlock story. It's not great but it was a gift for a friend who enjoys torturing poor Mycroft far too much. I hope it suits :).
Title: Intervention
Author:binglejells
Rating:PG
Pairing: None. Mycroft, Sherlock semi-friendship.
Length: 1895
Warnings: Alludes quite clearly to child abuse and molestation, nothing too graphic but could trigger.
Spoilers: None.
Disclaimer: Sherlock Holmes and Co. belong to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the ideas to BBC and Shine. I own nothing.
Summary: An eighteen year old Mycroft returns home from Oxford to pack up his last few belonings, has a revelation of sorts and leaves with one more precious bundle than expected.
Father has been into Sherlock’s room again. There is no sound of any sort emanating from inside, but Mycroft knows too well that it means very little. Silence afterwards, always silence. It has been engrained in them from an early age that the quieter one can be where father is concerned, the better one’s chances.
At eighteen, Mycroft has grown out of finding useless excuses for his father. If he’s honest with himself, he knows he grew out of it the first time he had asked Arthur Marlborough from next door about mothers and fathers and things. Arthur’s father worked at the bank. Arthur’s father came home every Tuesday evening with chocolate. Arthur’s father tucked him in every night with a bedtime story. Arthur’s father didn’t get into bed with him.
Of course, now he is old enough to have grown an opinion about all this, he has also grown out of his welcome. He is old enough to legally support himself. Whether he has the means to or not is apparently of no concern anymore to the senior Holmes.
Fortunately, his time spent buried under the contents of his bookshelves for a significant portion of his life is actually paying off. Mycroft has been up at Oxford for two terms now and each time he returns he feels less and less encompassed in his father’s dark and imposing shadow. He knows he is growing, in more ways than one, according to Sherlock. He feels himself surfacing from the depths of his father’s suffocating darkness with every day he spends away from home.
He is now a grown man with six months of experience of life devoid of the dominating presence of a tyrannical and controlling parent. He has no need to flinch at the sound of footsteps during the night or of a door clicking shut with a kind of spiteful finality.
Mycroft is no longer the tremulous teenager who left home wary of even those with even the very best intentions towards him. Now he is breaking away, rising to the top. His tutors genuinely respect his academic abilities; his fellows either revel in or resent his presence depending on their own insignificant levels of self-importance and jealousy. He has been told he could go far, Very far indeed, boy, keep up the dedication to hard work and it will be your footprints the lads behind you will be falling over themselves to tread in.
And father likes this, oh yes, he does. It looks good on the immaculate family records to have such a high achiever. But it also means that his purpose has been fulfilled, he is no longer needed or wanted in the house. His place is wherever he needs to be to ensure his potential is reached in full for the good of the Holmes name. He has no place under his father’s roof anymore, and therefore, no place under his thumb.
He knows he should feel relieved but all he can feel as he stands outside his brother’s bedroom door is guilt. Tonight is his first night back at home since Christmas but it’s also his last night at the house. His last few remaining belongings have been boxed and packed into the car, his room a hollow cell. Empty. Impersonal. The hinges on his bedroom door now creak when they are forced open and shut. Disuse. No one visits his room anymore.
The hinges on Sherlock’s bedroom door are silent as he opens it. The room is pitch dark, heavy curtains drawn against the bright illumination of the full moon beaming down onto the windowpane outside. His brother is curled up in a lump under the crimson duvet. He is most certainly not sniffling quietly under the bed covers. He is also not a fool.
“Get out.” Comes the muffled order. “Kindly piss off and leave me be.”
“Sherlock…” Mycroft knows any kind of contact is out of the question, at least until his brother calms down and succumbs to the exhaustion. The kind of utter exhaustion that a high functioning, bad-mouthed eleven year old who has an interest in science and insulting his elders, should never have to face.
“I said leave me be, you great, gluttonous walrus.”
His young brother is nothing if not creative. Artistically, mentally, musically. He doesn’t realise it yet, of course, Sherlock is too busy being infuriated by everyone and everything he comes into contact with. One day he will realise though, and after that, there will be no holding him back. He’ll be brilliant.
Currently, Sherlock is too busy resenting him for passing on the unwanted attention, for the abandonment, and apparently for taking advantage of the catering services around his college. It’s not that he’s put on weight as such, more so that he has filled out a bit across the shoulders and around the waist. It tends to happen when one is exposed to proper nutrition, when one is deemed important enough to be fed regularly. Sherlock, he noticed earlier, is still skin and bone.
“Go to sleep, Sherlock. He won’t be back tonight,” he tells his brother, gingerly settling on the far edge of the bed.
Though it is dark inside Sherlock’s room, Mycroft knows a curly, dark head has emerged from inside the over-heated cocoon of blankets and pillows. He can feel Sherlock’s pale eyes alighting on the side of his face, smell the remains of his father on the rustling covers, the lingering scent of - oh God he’s going to be sick if he doesn’t calm down.
“Thought you were going,” the boy says.
Sherlock sounds his age, which is in itself, disturbing. The child was born with a forked tongue in his mouth. He is frequently petulant, scathing and frightfully inquisitive at times, but he never sounds anything but advanced in his perceptions.
“In the morning,” Mycroft replies.
The outline of Sherlock’s pale face is just about visible in the gloom, now that his eyes have had time to adjust. He wasn’t expecting Sherlock to be almost face to face with him by the time he answers.
“Don’t need a minder. Don’t need you at all, actually. It’s been just…fine without you.”
Yet his brother doesn’t sound entirely convinced. Sherlock can be as dismissive as he likes with his vocabulary. It doesn’t make the sensation of five small fingers curling into the material of his shirt feel any less agonising at all. Mycroft wants to squeeze the little fingers, take the small, white face into his hands and refuse to let go until Sherlock knows exactly what he wants to say but, for some reason, cannot.
I’m so sorry.
This isn’t your fault.
I should never have left.
Never again.
No more.
I promise.
But when he opens his mouth, the fingers have already disappeared and all he can muster is a quiet, “In the morning, Sherlock. Sleep well.”
The child is fatigued and his breathing quickly evens out into the telltale rhythm of sleep. Mycroft knows why, remembers the drain of energy, the refusal to react to a huge, smothering body and unwelcome hands. Every ounce of self-control bunches up into frozen muscles for the single purpose of self-preservation and the fragile hope that this will be the last time.
***
Mycroft is half way back to Oxford by the time Sherlock wakes the next morning. He emerges from sleep with only a minute twitch of indication before he is launching into a sitting position, wide eyed and looking rather suspicious.
“This is abduction, Mycroft,” he says, turning calm and calculating eyes towards the window to watch the trees roll past.
“Would you like to go back?” the elder replies.
Sherlock curls tighter into the bundle of blankets he is confined to under the seatbelt.
“Where are we going?” He frowns as he catches a glimpse of his brother’s face. “Mycroft, what happened to your eye?”
Mycroft catches a glance of himself in the rear view mirror; a gorgeous purple bruise is blossoming at the corner of his eye already. It doesn’t smart half as much as it did earlier just after his father’s fist had met his eye socket. He had entered the morning room and informed his father, with square shoulders and clear intent that they had lived through the last of this unthinkable business.
It was with the first connection of his father’s fist against his face, and later his ribs as well, that Mycroft saw his first act of freedom flourish in front of him. With his ribcage rippling pain outwards from the centre and his eye throbbing, he’d finally let go of any remaining fears and promptly belted his father back. The force of every injustice the man had ever served to he and Sherlock powered the final blow he had delivered.
Mycroft had limped out of the morning room with a feeling of optimism that he’d never experienced before. As he had carried a sleeping Sherlock out to the car, he had caught sight of his father through the door, still on the floor, elbows locked and resting on his knees.
“We are going to my residence in Oxford. Our aunt is coming to collect you at the weekend,” he tells Sherlock.
The child’s eyes almost bug out of his head.
“You’re sending me to France? How unutterably dull. No. I’m afraid I’m going to have to refuse."
I’m sending you away for your own good, can’t you see? Out of sight, out of mind. He’ll never reach you there, he wants to say. But it doesn’t come.
“You will be well taken care of. I dare say mother may even join you when she returns from Edinburgh. Even life with her sister will soon seem preferable to sharing an otherwise empty house with him once she knows what he has done. She’ll follow you to the end of the earth,” he assures his brother.
Sherlock glares at him, turns away from him and gives a long, suffering sigh. Mycroft cannot help but shake his head in some kind of affectionate manner he isn’t even sure he fully understands. Returning his full attention to the road, he thinks of the boy next to him, so hostile, so aggrieved and suspicious of any good deed; inwardly waiting for punishment. Mycroft understands. Mycroft’s ribs are still throbbing with it.
He is about to tell Sherlock how lucky he is, how he is going to be all right and that he is going to reach his full potential now because, damn it all, even if he doesn’t want to be, he’ll be safe. He is almost about to tell Sherlock that he is doing the right thing, that it’s for the best, but a chilly hand finds it’s way onto Mycroft’s crisp, white shirt sleeve and a mop of curly hair tips precariously off the seat and onto his arm.
Sherlock may not want his help, may never learn to appreciate what helping him has cost them, but he does need it. The vice-like grip on his sleeve and the warm weight of his brother’s dozing head tells him all he needs to know. Mycroft knows he will be resented, insulted and constantly worried for the rest of his life, but he has done the right thing. He has intervened and this, he fears, will only be the beginning.