#565 - [FIC] Sfumato (Mycroft, Sherlock)
Title: Sfumato
Alternate Link: AO3
Word Count: 2178
Characters/Pairings: Mycroft (POV), Sherlock, Jim/Mycroft
Rating: PG-13, contains non-explicit references to adult material
Summary: Mycroft is too old to believe in monsters, but he cannot shake the fear that he will spend the rest of his life listening for the footsteps of a man long dead echoing behind him.
Warnings: Highlight here to see warnings. May be triggering: implied parent/child sexual abuse, implied pedophilia, references to drug use and overdose, alcoholism, non-explicit non-con (Jim/Mycroft), victim blaming, potentially disturbing imagery.
Author's Note: This is a companion piece to Chiaroscuro.
The world that feels unbalanced and chaotic to a thirteen year old boy forced to grow up too fast has more or less righted itself for the man you become. Names and faces change, old lovers return to you as new enemies, but if years of careful, dedicated practice have not taught you to take it in stride, they have taught you to give the appearance that you have.
In many ways, you have become the man your father would have wanted you to be.
Of course, there are still days when the customary tilt of the earth seems to skew and the ground threatens to crumble away beneath your feet. The pride that keeps you upright through your twenties wanes through your thirties, extinguished in your forties by the weight of a past that will not rest.
"Twenty years, Mycroft. He isn't here anymore. He isn't coming back."
He means well, but you know that he does not understand. Twenty years has not changed the fact that there are days when you look in the mirror and cannot recognize the face staring back at you as your own.
For these days, you have the umbrella.
Two hundred years ago, they might have called you a dandy. These days, the words are not so quaint. Even so, a man carrying an umbrella in London passes unnoticed in a way a man with a cane does not. You are utterly forgettable. In a sea of ten thousand faces, no one remembers the umbrella man. If you are sometimes seen to lean rather heavily to one side or the other, you need only smile your mother’s mild, ironic smile and remark that it has been a long day.
It is easy to obscure the truth, which is that more and more, you do not know where your fondness for drink ends and your hatred for the boy crying himself sick in the toilets begins.
You meet James Moriarty in those toilets, horrified when he crawls under the door of your stall and stands there with his hands in his pockets, watching you cry over a leather-bound copy of Grimm’s Märchen. You’re too embarrassed to ask him to leave you alone, then or later, when he backs you into a corner and tells you that he’d like to take you apart and figure out how to put you back together again, as if you are some fascinating creature he has only now discovered.
When he begins to invite himself into your room at all hours of the night, your curiosity gets the better of you. James tells you things that frighten you and things that fill you with delight, passing from one to the other with a fluid ease that you will not understand until you are much older. It is a rare person who can command your undivided attention. Sometimes you lie there for hours in the dark, listening to him talk without interruption. Every day you fall a little more in love with the words he uses and the way he touches your face when he talks, like he’s trying to remind himself that you’re there, even though he can’t see you.
You don’t mean to tell him, but the words come out in a desperate exhale one night when you are curled close enough to feel his breath on your face. You have never told anyone, not even Mummy, and you are shaken by the sound of your confession. Saying it makes it real. Fear floods you and flushes all the detritus to the surface where you feel each moment of pain and confusion again in sickening, hot pulses, one after the other.
It doesn’t matter that you are a hundred miles away when you are always lonely and hurting inside a body that is no longer your own. There is an itch building beneath your skin and someday you will no longer be able to keep yourself from tearing it open to scratch.
"It’s okay," James tells you, in that quiet, serious way he has sometimes. "My da liked to get a leg over, too."
You don’t know what to say. The mixture of relief and repulsion that twists your belly is too new, the wounds of his words too raw to examine just yet. You are trembling when James pulls you in, murmuring that he understands, that everything will be all right if you only let him in. His mouth is soft and wet and exciting and when he promises to make it better, all better, there is only one thing you can say.
"How?"
James kisses you again, until your lungs are burning with the need for oxygen, and into the space between you, he breathes the three words that change everything.
"Let’s kill him."
To say that James Moriarty passes into manhood bearing no resemblance to the boy you remember would be very far from the truth indeed. Underneath the fine attire and the slick demeanor ("It’s Jim now, sweetheart"), he is still that changeable, unshakable being who held your wrist steady as you administered the potassium chloride that let you take back the broken shards of your childhood.
Any of the tenderness he once bore you, however, is gone. You are not even permitted to keep the memory of it.
He jerks it out of you, with his spider hands and lying tongue, and leaves you with nothing but the raw outline of the hours you had once considered a reprieve from the horrors of home. His intentions were spelled out long ago, he reminds you, ever so gently, as he guts you. Something tells you he will not make good on his promise to put you back together, but you suppose that is too much to ask from any man.
After your reunion, Jim turns up again and again like a bad penny.
In your memories of him, you are always crying. Before now, you have always taken that as evidence of the safety he created for you---a world in which you were allowed to cry, without reprimand---but now you are not so sure. There is too much fascination in his face upon reexamination. The suggestion had been there, but you had not known any better. It had never occurred to you that he had liked to watch you cry or that so many of your tears had welled up as a result of the strings he had learned to pull while lying there in your bed, beside you and beneath you.
"It must kill you," Jim says, when you are rebuttoning the cuffs of your shirt. "Knowing he's a virgin. Knowing he chose it."
His little pet name for your brother is only one more reminder of the fact that the possibility of intimacy has been taken from you, first by your father and now by this self-styled Mephistopheles come to collect his fee for ridding you of your demons. In your mind, love begets only pain. Your experience bears out this conclusion.
You wonder if this is what loving someone ought to feel like. In a moment of weakness, you ask John what it is like to love Sherlock. You tell him to take his time.
"Difficult," he says, after a moment. "Really bloody difficult." He smiles, sympathetic, and pats your shoulder. "Cuppa before you're on your way?"
You sit quietly drinking tea with the man your brother loves, grateful that he is so patient. You have never wanted Sherlock to live as you do, keeping anyone who might care at arm's length, addicted to the opium of your own seclusion.
The day that you wander into the sitting room and find Sherlock sitting by the fire, you know he has found you out. A week has passed since his call and though you will never really be ready to talk about it with him, you have had time to prepare for the worst. It is a rare thing to see your brother struggling, but you recognize the signs as you take the chair next to him.
"You might have told me."
"And force you to bear the weight of it? No," you say. You would not have done that to him, knowing already how painful his transition to adulthood would be. "You were so young, so different even then. You felt his loss so acutely when he, when---"
"When you killed him." His gaze is pale and unyielding. "Isn't that right?"
"I needed to keep you safe."
You don't expect him to understand any more than you expect him to forgive you. Not when you have left him struggling to find his way in a world where he does not belong. You had meant well when you first distanced yourself. It was only for a while, only until you could make sure everything would be okay. But it has never been okay. You cannot recall a time when you were a welcome part of each other's lives, before you stopped keeping up and started keeping tabs on each other.
"You must have told Mummy."
"No."
His sneer is ugly and full of anger. "Then she figured it out. Mummy wasn't stupid, Mycroft. I remember that. She must have known."
You are weary of the lies, tired of keeping so many secrets, but you cannot bring yourself to tell Sherlock the truth when he has already lost one parent at your hands.
You cannot bear the thought of him knowing that she believed the worst of you. It didn’t matter that you parted your hair differently or that you had her smile. You had his eyes, his aquiline profile, his cleft chin. Every time she looked at you, she saw your father. Nothing could convince her that his sickness had not seeped all the way down into your bones when she had seen firsthand how abruptly Sherlock had begun to sever his ties to you.
When the end came, you were not even her son anymore.
"She must have known," Sherlock repeats. "Mycroft?"
There is still a sort of truth you can tell him, even if it is not what he wants to hear.
"Sometimes the things right in front of us are the hardest to see," you say. "It's the mind's way of protecting itself from the things that frighten us. Things we aren't prepared to understand."
As Sherlock processes this, you watch the fire crackling in the grate and try not to grind your teeth. Like most old habits, it is difficult to break. Out of the corner of your eye, you catch a glimpse of Sherlock picking at the inside of his forearm and wish you hadn’t. Every flash of the addict reminds you of his first overdose, how you had screamed and screamed and screamed inside your head at the thought of losing him and been too much of a coward to let him know.
He jiggles his knee, hands steepled. "John told me you love me. Even when I disappoint you. Why is it that John can see it and I can’t?"
"I suspect John knows what he’s looking for, more than you or I."
"How was I to know when you were never there? You---" His brow furrows and he shakes his head as if to rid himself of some notion. "You tried. I was the one who pushed you. It was only natural that you pushed back. Action and reaction."
In that moment, Sherlock reminds you of nothing so much as the boy who used to sneak into your bed when the nights were long and dark and full of terrors. It is rash, what you do next. Rash and impulsive and long overdue.
With twenty years of bad blood between you, you expect your first embrace to be an awkward affair, but Sherlock merely folds into your arms like he belongs there. One embrace cannot heal the wounds of a lifetime, but you do not intend to let him go again. With your hands and your heartbeat, you tell him. You plead for his forgiveness and for his patience. You will him to understand that though you have been distant and sometimes failed to protect him from himself and from the world, there has never been a time that you have not loved him.
You knead Sherlock's scalp with tender, trembling fingers, as much to soothe yourself as him. He says nothing, but you know in that moment, as he clings to you with a ferocity that shakes you to your core, that he has forgiven you. Silently, though he has not asked, you forgive him for being too young to understand. You forgive his anger and his hatred of you. You forgive him his flaws and the disappointment he has brought you at times.
Most importantly, you forgive him for pushing you away.
And though it is by far the most difficult thing you have ever had to do, somewhere in the quiet and the closeness you even find the courage to forgive yourself for letting him.
Alternate Link: AO3
Word Count: 2178
Characters/Pairings: Mycroft (POV), Sherlock, Jim/Mycroft
Rating: PG-13, contains non-explicit references to adult material
Summary: Mycroft is too old to believe in monsters, but he cannot shake the fear that he will spend the rest of his life listening for the footsteps of a man long dead echoing behind him.
Warnings: Highlight here to see warnings. May be triggering: implied parent/child sexual abuse, implied pedophilia, references to drug use and overdose, alcoholism, non-explicit non-con (Jim/Mycroft), victim blaming, potentially disturbing imagery.
Author's Note: This is a companion piece to Chiaroscuro.
The world that feels unbalanced and chaotic to a thirteen year old boy forced to grow up too fast has more or less righted itself for the man you become. Names and faces change, old lovers return to you as new enemies, but if years of careful, dedicated practice have not taught you to take it in stride, they have taught you to give the appearance that you have.
In many ways, you have become the man your father would have wanted you to be.
Of course, there are still days when the customary tilt of the earth seems to skew and the ground threatens to crumble away beneath your feet. The pride that keeps you upright through your twenties wanes through your thirties, extinguished in your forties by the weight of a past that will not rest.
"Twenty years, Mycroft. He isn't here anymore. He isn't coming back."
He means well, but you know that he does not understand. Twenty years has not changed the fact that there are days when you look in the mirror and cannot recognize the face staring back at you as your own.
For these days, you have the umbrella.
Two hundred years ago, they might have called you a dandy. These days, the words are not so quaint. Even so, a man carrying an umbrella in London passes unnoticed in a way a man with a cane does not. You are utterly forgettable. In a sea of ten thousand faces, no one remembers the umbrella man. If you are sometimes seen to lean rather heavily to one side or the other, you need only smile your mother’s mild, ironic smile and remark that it has been a long day.
It is easy to obscure the truth, which is that more and more, you do not know where your fondness for drink ends and your hatred for the boy crying himself sick in the toilets begins.
You meet James Moriarty in those toilets, horrified when he crawls under the door of your stall and stands there with his hands in his pockets, watching you cry over a leather-bound copy of Grimm’s Märchen. You’re too embarrassed to ask him to leave you alone, then or later, when he backs you into a corner and tells you that he’d like to take you apart and figure out how to put you back together again, as if you are some fascinating creature he has only now discovered.
When he begins to invite himself into your room at all hours of the night, your curiosity gets the better of you. James tells you things that frighten you and things that fill you with delight, passing from one to the other with a fluid ease that you will not understand until you are much older. It is a rare person who can command your undivided attention. Sometimes you lie there for hours in the dark, listening to him talk without interruption. Every day you fall a little more in love with the words he uses and the way he touches your face when he talks, like he’s trying to remind himself that you’re there, even though he can’t see you.
You don’t mean to tell him, but the words come out in a desperate exhale one night when you are curled close enough to feel his breath on your face. You have never told anyone, not even Mummy, and you are shaken by the sound of your confession. Saying it makes it real. Fear floods you and flushes all the detritus to the surface where you feel each moment of pain and confusion again in sickening, hot pulses, one after the other.
It doesn’t matter that you are a hundred miles away when you are always lonely and hurting inside a body that is no longer your own. There is an itch building beneath your skin and someday you will no longer be able to keep yourself from tearing it open to scratch.
"It’s okay," James tells you, in that quiet, serious way he has sometimes. "My da liked to get a leg over, too."
You don’t know what to say. The mixture of relief and repulsion that twists your belly is too new, the wounds of his words too raw to examine just yet. You are trembling when James pulls you in, murmuring that he understands, that everything will be all right if you only let him in. His mouth is soft and wet and exciting and when he promises to make it better, all better, there is only one thing you can say.
"How?"
James kisses you again, until your lungs are burning with the need for oxygen, and into the space between you, he breathes the three words that change everything.
"Let’s kill him."
To say that James Moriarty passes into manhood bearing no resemblance to the boy you remember would be very far from the truth indeed. Underneath the fine attire and the slick demeanor ("It’s Jim now, sweetheart"), he is still that changeable, unshakable being who held your wrist steady as you administered the potassium chloride that let you take back the broken shards of your childhood.
Any of the tenderness he once bore you, however, is gone. You are not even permitted to keep the memory of it.
He jerks it out of you, with his spider hands and lying tongue, and leaves you with nothing but the raw outline of the hours you had once considered a reprieve from the horrors of home. His intentions were spelled out long ago, he reminds you, ever so gently, as he guts you. Something tells you he will not make good on his promise to put you back together, but you suppose that is too much to ask from any man.
After your reunion, Jim turns up again and again like a bad penny.
In your memories of him, you are always crying. Before now, you have always taken that as evidence of the safety he created for you---a world in which you were allowed to cry, without reprimand---but now you are not so sure. There is too much fascination in his face upon reexamination. The suggestion had been there, but you had not known any better. It had never occurred to you that he had liked to watch you cry or that so many of your tears had welled up as a result of the strings he had learned to pull while lying there in your bed, beside you and beneath you.
"It must kill you," Jim says, when you are rebuttoning the cuffs of your shirt. "Knowing he's a virgin. Knowing he chose it."
His little pet name for your brother is only one more reminder of the fact that the possibility of intimacy has been taken from you, first by your father and now by this self-styled Mephistopheles come to collect his fee for ridding you of your demons. In your mind, love begets only pain. Your experience bears out this conclusion.
You wonder if this is what loving someone ought to feel like. In a moment of weakness, you ask John what it is like to love Sherlock. You tell him to take his time.
"Difficult," he says, after a moment. "Really bloody difficult." He smiles, sympathetic, and pats your shoulder. "Cuppa before you're on your way?"
You sit quietly drinking tea with the man your brother loves, grateful that he is so patient. You have never wanted Sherlock to live as you do, keeping anyone who might care at arm's length, addicted to the opium of your own seclusion.
The day that you wander into the sitting room and find Sherlock sitting by the fire, you know he has found you out. A week has passed since his call and though you will never really be ready to talk about it with him, you have had time to prepare for the worst. It is a rare thing to see your brother struggling, but you recognize the signs as you take the chair next to him.
"You might have told me."
"And force you to bear the weight of it? No," you say. You would not have done that to him, knowing already how painful his transition to adulthood would be. "You were so young, so different even then. You felt his loss so acutely when he, when---"
"When you killed him." His gaze is pale and unyielding. "Isn't that right?"
"I needed to keep you safe."
You don't expect him to understand any more than you expect him to forgive you. Not when you have left him struggling to find his way in a world where he does not belong. You had meant well when you first distanced yourself. It was only for a while, only until you could make sure everything would be okay. But it has never been okay. You cannot recall a time when you were a welcome part of each other's lives, before you stopped keeping up and started keeping tabs on each other.
"You must have told Mummy."
"No."
His sneer is ugly and full of anger. "Then she figured it out. Mummy wasn't stupid, Mycroft. I remember that. She must have known."
You are weary of the lies, tired of keeping so many secrets, but you cannot bring yourself to tell Sherlock the truth when he has already lost one parent at your hands.
You cannot bear the thought of him knowing that she believed the worst of you. It didn’t matter that you parted your hair differently or that you had her smile. You had his eyes, his aquiline profile, his cleft chin. Every time she looked at you, she saw your father. Nothing could convince her that his sickness had not seeped all the way down into your bones when she had seen firsthand how abruptly Sherlock had begun to sever his ties to you.
When the end came, you were not even her son anymore.
"She must have known," Sherlock repeats. "Mycroft?"
There is still a sort of truth you can tell him, even if it is not what he wants to hear.
"Sometimes the things right in front of us are the hardest to see," you say. "It's the mind's way of protecting itself from the things that frighten us. Things we aren't prepared to understand."
As Sherlock processes this, you watch the fire crackling in the grate and try not to grind your teeth. Like most old habits, it is difficult to break. Out of the corner of your eye, you catch a glimpse of Sherlock picking at the inside of his forearm and wish you hadn’t. Every flash of the addict reminds you of his first overdose, how you had screamed and screamed and screamed inside your head at the thought of losing him and been too much of a coward to let him know.
He jiggles his knee, hands steepled. "John told me you love me. Even when I disappoint you. Why is it that John can see it and I can’t?"
"I suspect John knows what he’s looking for, more than you or I."
"How was I to know when you were never there? You---" His brow furrows and he shakes his head as if to rid himself of some notion. "You tried. I was the one who pushed you. It was only natural that you pushed back. Action and reaction."
In that moment, Sherlock reminds you of nothing so much as the boy who used to sneak into your bed when the nights were long and dark and full of terrors. It is rash, what you do next. Rash and impulsive and long overdue.
With twenty years of bad blood between you, you expect your first embrace to be an awkward affair, but Sherlock merely folds into your arms like he belongs there. One embrace cannot heal the wounds of a lifetime, but you do not intend to let him go again. With your hands and your heartbeat, you tell him. You plead for his forgiveness and for his patience. You will him to understand that though you have been distant and sometimes failed to protect him from himself and from the world, there has never been a time that you have not loved him.
You knead Sherlock's scalp with tender, trembling fingers, as much to soothe yourself as him. He says nothing, but you know in that moment, as he clings to you with a ferocity that shakes you to your core, that he has forgiven you. Silently, though he has not asked, you forgive him for being too young to understand. You forgive his anger and his hatred of you. You forgive him his flaws and the disappointment he has brought you at times.
Most importantly, you forgive him for pushing you away.
And though it is by far the most difficult thing you have ever had to do, somewhere in the quiet and the closeness you even find the courage to forgive yourself for letting him.