Fic: Another Life to Live
Title:Another Life to Live
Rating: R
Warnings: Child abuse, lanuage
Summary: It was almost as if he had died, to look into the eyes of a three year old Sherlock and know that they no longer shared a past, that the memories lived on only in himself. But what if this time could be better? What if this time he could protect him?
I hate it when John gets his migraines. They do not happen too frequently, maybe once every two months and last for a day and then he sleeps through the next, too exhausted to do anything more than curl against Sherlock, or whatever adult is caring for him, and drift.
Harry said that he used to get them when he was a child and grew out of them in his teenage years. Mycroft still got him the MRI but nothing ever came of it. It was, as they say, just one of those things.
Today John is sleeping. He woke in the morning and made a valiant effort of opening his eyes and blearily trudging all the way to the washroom before he slumped over the sink and let Sherlock loop an arm under his shoulders and bring him back to bed.
Today John is mine to watch over.
I have companions of course. An army set against the things that go bump in the night. We watch over our sleeping charge with devotion few can claim.
We do not sleep, we do not daydream of lovers left behind or contemplate the chores remaining for us at home. We, the devout army of Sherlock, do not spare the time to blink.
In our ranks the Orange Shock Blanket keeps our charge warm and gives without words a permanent embrace and a feeling of safety that only children can know, one which emanates from every fold into the very skin.
Teddy Bear is our inside man, our body guard, throwing himself against our boys very heart in protection. He is the cuddle that lasts through the day and night and never needs to stand up, he never needs to stretch or take a breath or see the light of day. He would never dream of loving anyone more than the child who holds him.
And then there is me, the overseer of all.
I watch from my perch on the pillow Sherlock used the night before. I stand in for him when he is gone, acting Commander. I watch the light shift and I count the times his chest rises and falls.
I do not daydream of lovers I have not left behind. I do not, can not, spare the time to blink. I never look away.
And when Sherlock comes in on tiptoes and sits on the edge of the bed with a book, knowing that John will not wake, I will give him a full report in absolute silence. I will tell him about every breath and every heartbeat he missed while he was away.
But between heartbeats my thoughts do wander, and sometimes, I fancy that the things I am remembering are the same things John sees in his dreams.
Even if I hope he has forgotten them.
For now it is early. The sun is casting golden morning light through drawn curtains and John is sleeping too deeply to be remembering the things I am remembering for him.
For now, I will let my companions keep him safe and I will dream the dreams I hope he never will.
Sherlock went back to Inspector Jones with the results of the five cases and spite for the ones he had to sift through.
He gloried at first, listing off why the first case with the butler and his lover were too obvious and how could the officials be so dim witted and still not have caused the fall of the British Isles in their entirety? The second and third cases were cold and abrupt in their description. For those who do not love Sherlock it would have seemed he no longer cared at all what had happened to those children, that it meant nothing but an intellectual annoyance that their murderer would never be caught. To those that do love him…let’s say that we know better, and that for us, the way he felt would have been written in every word he said and etched into every nuance of his countenance. There was a time long before
John Watson was told not to believe in heroes in which Sherlock had not yet been the actor he grew to be. There was a time when one could see through the armor he built around himself.
The case with the martyred nurse had the Inspector gasping and amazed, but more profoundly frustrated at his own new insight to his own limited mental capacities. Each facts were said with growing contention and each deduction became more condescending. At the end of the short description Sherlock was frustrated and despairing once more at the state of humanity and the fact that his own future hinged on the continuation of interactions with men such as this.
The Inspector fumed for entirely different reasons and dismissed the entire lot as useless.
There was, in his mind, no glory without arrests. No justice without someone’s punishment at his hands.
No promotion without putting someone else into the mud.
Sherlock threw down his fifth case as carelessly as one would the trash. Van Gogh trading a painting for art supplies and cigarettes.
“Murder. It was the wife.” Sherlock watched as the words sunk in, he let the cruel grin curve the edge of his mouth.
The Inspector frowned in confusion. “Wh- No it…”
Sherlock tossed the glossy images of the crime scene onto the cluttered desk, the dead man staring up at them with blank blue eyes around coffee stains and dirty crunched up napkins.
Jones turned away, pulled his hand back when the image of the back of the mans crushed skull drifted against his skin.
“It is impossible?” Sherlock asked with too much brilliance, fierce and angry. “Would that be because you left almost none of the original evidence? Because you took away the interrogations and thought it would be funny to show me a closed case? The write up you gave me labeling it as an unsolved murder is in a different style of paper done on a cheap mass produced printer, but new, nothing like the quality of the ink from the rest of the papers done what…nine, ten years ago? Because you wanted to humble me with what was closed as an accidental death? Murder. The Wife.”
Inspector Jones scowled and crossed his arms in front of his chest, clearly uncomfortable, wanting to stand from his chair and bring them to a more equal height, use his impressive bulk to bully Sherlock into submission. Typical, animalistic, boring.
“Fine.” He squirmed and then steeled himself, drawing his eyebrows together in annoyance and partial anger. “And let me guess, you have the power to rewrite history? I was on the case myself. Took me two weeks but I got it. It was an accident. Don’t waste your breath, and my time. I am doing you a favor by knocking you down a few pegs, you will not get anywhere in the Yard with that attitude of yours. Now what else have you got for me?”
Sherlock fumed. His hands fisting and then slapping down onto the face of the dead man staring up between them, unflinching as the Inspectors eyes glanced down at where his fingers separated over crushed flesh.
“Murder is what I ‘have for you’.” He spat. Frustrated that he was being deliberately sabotaged and dismissed. The faces of the other two cases were burning in his mind even as he forced himself to ignore them, as he stripped their silenced cries from his mind. A baby boy who would have been around his age now, and a girl in yellow pigtails who would not stop smiling from her fading photograph.
The faces that would not go away even when everything else faded into the haze and the oblivion of cocaine and morphine.
Inside, Sherlock was screaming.
“You looked at the post mortem but you only saw his blood alcohol level. More than sufficient to lose balance, to fall and have reactions too slowed to cushion the blow. Bam! One bad night and suddenly you don’t get to wake up the next day to regret the fact that you are still alive. At that level he was one drink away from legal surgical anesthesia. It would have been probable even that he could have had a seizure or fallen into a coma. This of course ignoring the cirrhosis of his liver, the gastro-intestinal ulcers, and the malnutrition. The man was a professional drunk. Why then? Why that day? He had certainly been worse off! Or did you ignore the scarring on his arms? How about the poorly healed rib fractures? Was it too off-putting to look at his face? Nose obviously broken more than once, zaphoid process shattered in the last two years. Bar-Bralwer. An angry drunk then. What are the chances of an angry drunk dying comparatively peacefully form the way he lived?”
Sherlock could not stop. He was a train wreck barreling towards the abrupt and inevitable end. Inspector Jones was pushing his chair back even though the desk separated them, pushing himself to stand.
“Oh but it gets better! We have ignored the poison in his blood system! Oh sure, the Belladonna was in medicinal quantities. Is that how you wrote it off? Maybe he had a headache. Not enough to kill him! Because of course the man drinking a bottle of whisky every night would want to use herbal soothers rather than, oh maybe, alcohol? The Belladonna was being used to incapacitate him nightly. He never even knew it. Staggering, blurred vision, dry mouth, slurred speech, why should he, just another night after all! Someone with access to his liquor then, every day. Someone who would want him passing out earlier, rendering him more incapacitated, less able to go after them when he was angry? And who would that be? Who traditionally uses poison through all of history? Who would have the know how and the access? The wife.”
Jones was not backing up anymore, he was looking down at the photos, he was watching the clues fall into place.
“But oh she was clever, cleverer than you. Something happened to trigger it abruptly; otherwise she would have just left. Oh sure, some people get trapped in bad relationships but she was clever, too clever for that and she was already fighting back. She could have found a way out, escaped him, the police, no. Something happened and she had to stop him before even the Belladonna did. I was nearly perfect. The placement of the fatal wound, the crushing force with a flat object, the way she pulled things down on top of him as if he was reaching out as he fell. The blood splatter would have been wrong but you would not have noticed it, simple minds and all. But she made a mistake. Pitty. They nearly always do. She should have just left him but she got greedy, wanted revenge.”
Sherlock looked up, knowing he was brilliant, wanting to see the understanding in the Inspectors face, wanting to know that this one was his. This time he could put the pieces back together.
“She was short wasn’t she? Just a little thing. She probably appeared harmless and small. She probably even cried when you spoke to her. Did she make you believe it? Did she break your heart that she was all alone now? With the quality of her work I would say that she was a sociopath but she then she would have gone for better prospects in the first place. Unrepentant then, appearing completely normal and underneath all of that…calculated brilliance. It was the angle of the wound if you have not figured it out. She got him to turn his back and probably hit him with something handy, a frying pan more than likely, but she hit him in the lower back of the head. The angle would have been right for purposeful trauma, but not as you so readily accepted, the floor.” Sherlock smiled, pleased that the Inspector had sunk back into his chair but more pleased that a thought had come to him, one last thread that made the case almost…interesting. She was smart, possibly even brilliant. She could have stood on a chair, worn taller shoes, kicked the back of his knees in, and yet, she didn’t. She took the chance of the angle and it must have haunted her, the imperfection, this flaw. But the advantage was clear, at least, to him.
Cerebellum destroyed first. The center for motor control. Beyond that the brain stem, suffering devastating trauma. Breathing. Heartbeat.
Failing death, if she could not hit hard enough, he would never have hit anyone ever again.
Inspector Jones stood again, a marionette dancing at the end of strings. He smiled. Forgetting the insults and the anger.
This was it. His big break.
He shoveled the photos that he would not touch before into his hands and held them against his chest like a morbid paper baby as he called up the file on his computer, giving a shout as the information flooded onto his screen.
She was still alive then. A real live human to capture.
Jones smile turned on Sherlock.
He would have access to the cases he wanted. All of the risk would be worth it for Jones to let him in. His reprieve from the boredom that clawed at him every waking moment.
His perfect career.
Jones made for the door, nearly forgetting Sherlock in his haste. “Two suspects.” He said cheerily, happily, as he opened the door to the main floor. “But I am sure I will figure that much out! If worse comes to worse one will martyr themselves for the other if I remember them correctly, horrible messy case this was.”
Sherlock felt his heart drop, a cold sweat breaking out on his skin.
“Two-”
“No wife,” Jones smile bared his teeth, his mustache pulling grotesquely. “But he had two children.”
The text when it came was short and considering whom it concerned, fairly innocuous.
‘Found Sherlock running unsanctioned experiments on human DNA. <3’
The five minute interval between this and the next text message gave Mycroft time to consider 27 likely points of concern. The message, when it came with the sound of an umbrella being opened, considerably narrowed down the possibilities and highlighted in his mind the one that he had dreaded the most nearly all of their lives.
‘DNA identified. Samples include both boys. <3’
Mycroft got in the back of his unmarked black car and told the driver that all lights en route would be changed to green.
He always knew this day would come, thought that it would have come sooner. Their questions were never going to be like other children’s ‘Where do babies come from?’, it was always going to be ‘What am I?’.
They had never asked, not as toddlers who had never had the cause to say ‘mummy’, not as children being shown the typical family through stories and peers and knowing that they were intrinsically different.
They had never asked where their parents were. Never asked why they had a Mycroft and a Nana and an Aunty and a host of bodyguards.
Never asked how one day, they had simply begun to exist.
And how would he tell them? How could he?
Most parents debate what age to let their children know that Santa is a story. They wait for the day their children will come to them with wet eyes and ask why they lied.
Mycroft lives every day knowing that one day his boys, broken, and hurt, and betrayed, will ask why they are different from every other child in the world. They will ask how they came to exist.
And while other parents hold their children and say ‘We love you and all of your gifts from Santa were gifts of love from us.’
Mycroft would look at his children, look them in the eye and know their pain and their brilliance, and decide whether or not to tell them that once upon a time they had lives and hopes and dreams that they will never know. That they had grown, lived, and in a way, died, and came back amnesiacs with a silenced past and had been reborn in blood; or to lie to them and hope that they never knew how much he had taken away from them by omitting the truth.
Could he tell his boys, his children, that the nightmares that plagued them were true? That once upon a time men had been allowed to abuse and torture them? That bad things happen to the good and the bad and the innocent indiscriminately?
Could he look Sherlock in the eye and tell him that he had failed him as a brother? Could he answer questions about phantoms that had tainted two lifetimes and have the audacity to hope for the forgiveness he had not dared hope for when his brother still lived? Could he be absolved now that the man who had been both tormenter and father lay in the ground for decades?
Worse. If Sherlock had the capacity, the love, the right, to forgive him...how could he face his other charge?
John who had been there for every cry in the night, every hurt, and illness, and compare how he had failed with the very same task? How could he survive Johns pleading questions, his need to know how someone could hurt Sherlock?
How they could let him be hurt.
Could he sit with his seven year old boys and make their ancient eyes timeless? Could he sit and pretend not to die when John, who slept still with a teddy bear and woke every morning with a blinding smile and a kiss for everyone he loved, asked him how many men he had killed in his last life?
What could he do when John asked him to describe war and Sherlock to describe homicide?
What would he do when they knew too much to forgive him any longer?
Rating: R
Warnings: Child abuse, lanuage
Summary: It was almost as if he had died, to look into the eyes of a three year old Sherlock and know that they no longer shared a past, that the memories lived on only in himself. But what if this time could be better? What if this time he could protect him?
I hate it when John gets his migraines. They do not happen too frequently, maybe once every two months and last for a day and then he sleeps through the next, too exhausted to do anything more than curl against Sherlock, or whatever adult is caring for him, and drift.
Harry said that he used to get them when he was a child and grew out of them in his teenage years. Mycroft still got him the MRI but nothing ever came of it. It was, as they say, just one of those things.
Today John is sleeping. He woke in the morning and made a valiant effort of opening his eyes and blearily trudging all the way to the washroom before he slumped over the sink and let Sherlock loop an arm under his shoulders and bring him back to bed.
Today John is mine to watch over.
I have companions of course. An army set against the things that go bump in the night. We watch over our sleeping charge with devotion few can claim.
We do not sleep, we do not daydream of lovers left behind or contemplate the chores remaining for us at home. We, the devout army of Sherlock, do not spare the time to blink.
In our ranks the Orange Shock Blanket keeps our charge warm and gives without words a permanent embrace and a feeling of safety that only children can know, one which emanates from every fold into the very skin.
Teddy Bear is our inside man, our body guard, throwing himself against our boys very heart in protection. He is the cuddle that lasts through the day and night and never needs to stand up, he never needs to stretch or take a breath or see the light of day. He would never dream of loving anyone more than the child who holds him.
And then there is me, the overseer of all.
I watch from my perch on the pillow Sherlock used the night before. I stand in for him when he is gone, acting Commander. I watch the light shift and I count the times his chest rises and falls.
I do not daydream of lovers I have not left behind. I do not, can not, spare the time to blink. I never look away.
And when Sherlock comes in on tiptoes and sits on the edge of the bed with a book, knowing that John will not wake, I will give him a full report in absolute silence. I will tell him about every breath and every heartbeat he missed while he was away.
But between heartbeats my thoughts do wander, and sometimes, I fancy that the things I am remembering are the same things John sees in his dreams.
Even if I hope he has forgotten them.
For now it is early. The sun is casting golden morning light through drawn curtains and John is sleeping too deeply to be remembering the things I am remembering for him.
For now, I will let my companions keep him safe and I will dream the dreams I hope he never will.
Sherlock went back to Inspector Jones with the results of the five cases and spite for the ones he had to sift through.
He gloried at first, listing off why the first case with the butler and his lover were too obvious and how could the officials be so dim witted and still not have caused the fall of the British Isles in their entirety? The second and third cases were cold and abrupt in their description. For those who do not love Sherlock it would have seemed he no longer cared at all what had happened to those children, that it meant nothing but an intellectual annoyance that their murderer would never be caught. To those that do love him…let’s say that we know better, and that for us, the way he felt would have been written in every word he said and etched into every nuance of his countenance. There was a time long before
John Watson was told not to believe in heroes in which Sherlock had not yet been the actor he grew to be. There was a time when one could see through the armor he built around himself.
The case with the martyred nurse had the Inspector gasping and amazed, but more profoundly frustrated at his own new insight to his own limited mental capacities. Each facts were said with growing contention and each deduction became more condescending. At the end of the short description Sherlock was frustrated and despairing once more at the state of humanity and the fact that his own future hinged on the continuation of interactions with men such as this.
The Inspector fumed for entirely different reasons and dismissed the entire lot as useless.
There was, in his mind, no glory without arrests. No justice without someone’s punishment at his hands.
No promotion without putting someone else into the mud.
Sherlock threw down his fifth case as carelessly as one would the trash. Van Gogh trading a painting for art supplies and cigarettes.
“Murder. It was the wife.” Sherlock watched as the words sunk in, he let the cruel grin curve the edge of his mouth.
The Inspector frowned in confusion. “Wh- No it…”
Sherlock tossed the glossy images of the crime scene onto the cluttered desk, the dead man staring up at them with blank blue eyes around coffee stains and dirty crunched up napkins.
Jones turned away, pulled his hand back when the image of the back of the mans crushed skull drifted against his skin.
“It is impossible?” Sherlock asked with too much brilliance, fierce and angry. “Would that be because you left almost none of the original evidence? Because you took away the interrogations and thought it would be funny to show me a closed case? The write up you gave me labeling it as an unsolved murder is in a different style of paper done on a cheap mass produced printer, but new, nothing like the quality of the ink from the rest of the papers done what…nine, ten years ago? Because you wanted to humble me with what was closed as an accidental death? Murder. The Wife.”
Inspector Jones scowled and crossed his arms in front of his chest, clearly uncomfortable, wanting to stand from his chair and bring them to a more equal height, use his impressive bulk to bully Sherlock into submission. Typical, animalistic, boring.
“Fine.” He squirmed and then steeled himself, drawing his eyebrows together in annoyance and partial anger. “And let me guess, you have the power to rewrite history? I was on the case myself. Took me two weeks but I got it. It was an accident. Don’t waste your breath, and my time. I am doing you a favor by knocking you down a few pegs, you will not get anywhere in the Yard with that attitude of yours. Now what else have you got for me?”
Sherlock fumed. His hands fisting and then slapping down onto the face of the dead man staring up between them, unflinching as the Inspectors eyes glanced down at where his fingers separated over crushed flesh.
“Murder is what I ‘have for you’.” He spat. Frustrated that he was being deliberately sabotaged and dismissed. The faces of the other two cases were burning in his mind even as he forced himself to ignore them, as he stripped their silenced cries from his mind. A baby boy who would have been around his age now, and a girl in yellow pigtails who would not stop smiling from her fading photograph.
The faces that would not go away even when everything else faded into the haze and the oblivion of cocaine and morphine.
Inside, Sherlock was screaming.
“You looked at the post mortem but you only saw his blood alcohol level. More than sufficient to lose balance, to fall and have reactions too slowed to cushion the blow. Bam! One bad night and suddenly you don’t get to wake up the next day to regret the fact that you are still alive. At that level he was one drink away from legal surgical anesthesia. It would have been probable even that he could have had a seizure or fallen into a coma. This of course ignoring the cirrhosis of his liver, the gastro-intestinal ulcers, and the malnutrition. The man was a professional drunk. Why then? Why that day? He had certainly been worse off! Or did you ignore the scarring on his arms? How about the poorly healed rib fractures? Was it too off-putting to look at his face? Nose obviously broken more than once, zaphoid process shattered in the last two years. Bar-Bralwer. An angry drunk then. What are the chances of an angry drunk dying comparatively peacefully form the way he lived?”
Sherlock could not stop. He was a train wreck barreling towards the abrupt and inevitable end. Inspector Jones was pushing his chair back even though the desk separated them, pushing himself to stand.
“Oh but it gets better! We have ignored the poison in his blood system! Oh sure, the Belladonna was in medicinal quantities. Is that how you wrote it off? Maybe he had a headache. Not enough to kill him! Because of course the man drinking a bottle of whisky every night would want to use herbal soothers rather than, oh maybe, alcohol? The Belladonna was being used to incapacitate him nightly. He never even knew it. Staggering, blurred vision, dry mouth, slurred speech, why should he, just another night after all! Someone with access to his liquor then, every day. Someone who would want him passing out earlier, rendering him more incapacitated, less able to go after them when he was angry? And who would that be? Who traditionally uses poison through all of history? Who would have the know how and the access? The wife.”
Jones was not backing up anymore, he was looking down at the photos, he was watching the clues fall into place.
“But oh she was clever, cleverer than you. Something happened to trigger it abruptly; otherwise she would have just left. Oh sure, some people get trapped in bad relationships but she was clever, too clever for that and she was already fighting back. She could have found a way out, escaped him, the police, no. Something happened and she had to stop him before even the Belladonna did. I was nearly perfect. The placement of the fatal wound, the crushing force with a flat object, the way she pulled things down on top of him as if he was reaching out as he fell. The blood splatter would have been wrong but you would not have noticed it, simple minds and all. But she made a mistake. Pitty. They nearly always do. She should have just left him but she got greedy, wanted revenge.”
Sherlock looked up, knowing he was brilliant, wanting to see the understanding in the Inspectors face, wanting to know that this one was his. This time he could put the pieces back together.
“She was short wasn’t she? Just a little thing. She probably appeared harmless and small. She probably even cried when you spoke to her. Did she make you believe it? Did she break your heart that she was all alone now? With the quality of her work I would say that she was a sociopath but she then she would have gone for better prospects in the first place. Unrepentant then, appearing completely normal and underneath all of that…calculated brilliance. It was the angle of the wound if you have not figured it out. She got him to turn his back and probably hit him with something handy, a frying pan more than likely, but she hit him in the lower back of the head. The angle would have been right for purposeful trauma, but not as you so readily accepted, the floor.” Sherlock smiled, pleased that the Inspector had sunk back into his chair but more pleased that a thought had come to him, one last thread that made the case almost…interesting. She was smart, possibly even brilliant. She could have stood on a chair, worn taller shoes, kicked the back of his knees in, and yet, she didn’t. She took the chance of the angle and it must have haunted her, the imperfection, this flaw. But the advantage was clear, at least, to him.
Cerebellum destroyed first. The center for motor control. Beyond that the brain stem, suffering devastating trauma. Breathing. Heartbeat.
Failing death, if she could not hit hard enough, he would never have hit anyone ever again.
Inspector Jones stood again, a marionette dancing at the end of strings. He smiled. Forgetting the insults and the anger.
This was it. His big break.
He shoveled the photos that he would not touch before into his hands and held them against his chest like a morbid paper baby as he called up the file on his computer, giving a shout as the information flooded onto his screen.
She was still alive then. A real live human to capture.
Jones smile turned on Sherlock.
He would have access to the cases he wanted. All of the risk would be worth it for Jones to let him in. His reprieve from the boredom that clawed at him every waking moment.
His perfect career.
Jones made for the door, nearly forgetting Sherlock in his haste. “Two suspects.” He said cheerily, happily, as he opened the door to the main floor. “But I am sure I will figure that much out! If worse comes to worse one will martyr themselves for the other if I remember them correctly, horrible messy case this was.”
Sherlock felt his heart drop, a cold sweat breaking out on his skin.
“Two-”
“No wife,” Jones smile bared his teeth, his mustache pulling grotesquely. “But he had two children.”
The text when it came was short and considering whom it concerned, fairly innocuous.
‘Found Sherlock running unsanctioned experiments on human DNA. <3’
The five minute interval between this and the next text message gave Mycroft time to consider 27 likely points of concern. The message, when it came with the sound of an umbrella being opened, considerably narrowed down the possibilities and highlighted in his mind the one that he had dreaded the most nearly all of their lives.
‘DNA identified. Samples include both boys. <3’
Mycroft got in the back of his unmarked black car and told the driver that all lights en route would be changed to green.
He always knew this day would come, thought that it would have come sooner. Their questions were never going to be like other children’s ‘Where do babies come from?’, it was always going to be ‘What am I?’.
They had never asked, not as toddlers who had never had the cause to say ‘mummy’, not as children being shown the typical family through stories and peers and knowing that they were intrinsically different.
They had never asked where their parents were. Never asked why they had a Mycroft and a Nana and an Aunty and a host of bodyguards.
Never asked how one day, they had simply begun to exist.
And how would he tell them? How could he?
Most parents debate what age to let their children know that Santa is a story. They wait for the day their children will come to them with wet eyes and ask why they lied.
Mycroft lives every day knowing that one day his boys, broken, and hurt, and betrayed, will ask why they are different from every other child in the world. They will ask how they came to exist.
And while other parents hold their children and say ‘We love you and all of your gifts from Santa were gifts of love from us.’
Mycroft would look at his children, look them in the eye and know their pain and their brilliance, and decide whether or not to tell them that once upon a time they had lives and hopes and dreams that they will never know. That they had grown, lived, and in a way, died, and came back amnesiacs with a silenced past and had been reborn in blood; or to lie to them and hope that they never knew how much he had taken away from them by omitting the truth.
Could he tell his boys, his children, that the nightmares that plagued them were true? That once upon a time men had been allowed to abuse and torture them? That bad things happen to the good and the bad and the innocent indiscriminately?
Could he look Sherlock in the eye and tell him that he had failed him as a brother? Could he answer questions about phantoms that had tainted two lifetimes and have the audacity to hope for the forgiveness he had not dared hope for when his brother still lived? Could he be absolved now that the man who had been both tormenter and father lay in the ground for decades?
Worse. If Sherlock had the capacity, the love, the right, to forgive him...how could he face his other charge?
John who had been there for every cry in the night, every hurt, and illness, and compare how he had failed with the very same task? How could he survive Johns pleading questions, his need to know how someone could hurt Sherlock?
How they could let him be hurt.
Could he sit with his seven year old boys and make their ancient eyes timeless? Could he sit and pretend not to die when John, who slept still with a teddy bear and woke every morning with a blinding smile and a kiss for everyone he loved, asked him how many men he had killed in his last life?
What could he do when John asked him to describe war and Sherlock to describe homicide?
What would he do when they knew too much to forgive him any longer?