Fic: Another Life to Live Chapter 57

[medorikoi]

Title:Another Life to Live
Rating: R
Warnings: Child abuse, language
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?



Sherlock hates him.

No.

That’s too harsh a word, too long lasting. And compared to what he had known, to years of his brothers ire, from honest loathing, this, is nothing. Sherlock will still crawl into his lap, still give him a kiss on the cheek and roll his eyes in a way that means ‘you may be tolerable’.

Just not today. Not tonight.

Today, Sherlock wants to hate him.

But he is putting on a brave face for John’s sake.

Mycroft had made a decision based on their age and their emotional maturity, he could not have consulted his boys. They would never have agreed. They would have fought and screamed. A simple matter then, to take them on holiday and upon their return the alteration would be complete, a fact to accept, not one they could hope to fight.

Sherlock had known about it for days, god only knows how, the information had been classified. Did he have a tell? Had Sherlock looked at the way he grasped his umbrella and deduced that his thumb was too close to his knuckles? Was it the way he blinked? Failed to blink?

Worrisome. But better in the theoretical to be found out by your child than a foreign power.

Again, in the theoretical.

Sherlock had sent John down to breakfast and cornered him alone days ago in the room they shared on holiday. His sleepy face and mussed curls transforming the moment John was out of site, the softness of his curls and inherent in his youthful face belayed by the cold steel of his eyes and sharp brilliance of a biting tongue.

Mycroft did not deny anything. It would have been foolish and honestly, insulting to his intelligence. He simply agreed to Sherlock’s accusations and informed the child that his stance would not be changed.

It was the first time since he had by all rights adopted his brother that Sherlock had informed him that he hated him.

That he would never as long as he lived, forgive him.

The honest quick burning hatred was derailed by childish fury and however much Sherlock wanted to lash out and hurt him the words served as proof that this new disposition was a childish whim.

He tried not to take to heart that he was a ‘pig headed idiot’ and ‘if he couldn’t even raise two boys no wonder why there was so much war and famine in the world.’

Mycroft frowned but refrained from further action as the niggling of guilt that had caught in his throat choked any words of reprimand.

Sherlock’s fury disappeared in a flash and his little body slumped, world weary and defeated, leaning against the doorframe as if it were the only thing keeping him up. Powerless, and suddenly very small in a way that had nothing to do with his size.

The same blue eyes that had a moment ago proclaimed him the worst kind of arch nemesis looked up at him laboriously, the sheer effort of existing draining his life away. His mouth opened to throw another scathing remark but the frown, the pain, was etched too deeply on his face now. The words mutated as Sherlock gazed up at him. A command turned into a plea.

‘Don’t tell John.’

Mycroft promised.

And when Sherlock took in a breath that was too ragged and he stepped away from the doorframe only to remember that there was not an ounce of life left in him Mycroft dropped to his knees and let the little boy fall into his arms.

A sob was choked into his neck and tears and the wet press of a nose were as distracting as the painful hiccup that convulsed in the little chest and birthed an empathetic hopelessness in his heart. A guilt that pulled.

Sherlock was begging into his neck. ‘Please. Please don’t take him away from me.’

It did not matter that he did not say anything in return. Sherlock would not have heard a word of it. It was enough to hold him so tight that his feet needn’t touch the floor, to soothe his hand down disastrous curls and wait until the hopeless sobs died and were tucked away.

Sherlock pulled back and wiped his nose on the back of his hand. Mycroft could feel the wet patch of tears cooling on his skin and he held the little boys waist in his hands. He forced his face to remain passive as tear drenched lashes clumped together around blue eyes.

This had to be done. There was no reason to feel guilty. He was doing the right thing for his boys.

But when Sherlock asked him to stay away for the morning because there was no way he could look at Mycroft and not cry or scream, and then John would know, he promised.

Even though it hurt.

He made his excuses when the others came to take him to breakfast, to take him up to the cliffs. The detective Inspector was annoyed with him but he could do this for Sherlock. He could grant him a few hours reprieve from him if that is what he needed.

Hours later, when he climbed the path alone he was distracted enough to scuff his shoe on a rock and crush his take-away tea in his hands as he saved himself. The tea seeped into his pants and burned just enough to be uncomfortable and the guilt in his chest gave a satisfied sigh and told him it was balance. He felt three pairs of eyes on him as he made the solitary climb, Sherlock had already taken John and hidden him inside his own world, hidden him away from the reality Sherlock had discovered.

Would John hate him too? Mycroft wondered as he reached the top and saw two little boys standing on the edge of a cliff.

After all, it was his fiancé who would be moving across their shared room to a new bed of his own.

John as an adult was utterly unafraid to show Sherlock exactly when he was angry, why he was angry and exactly what Sherlock could do to make sure John kept making tea and refrained from throwing away every single experiment he found in communal living space. He was also unreservedly frank in what should have been an enormously intimidating meeting with a strange man in a dark suit and an umbrella in an empty car park. In fact John Watson retained his characteristic snark and general smart-ass sentiment while being strapped into a semtex vest by a lunatic which is not only a nod to the incredibly steel of his character but something very few people would be able to claim if put in similar circumstances.

John Watson as a child learned to keep a blank face.

The moment John Watson looked into the bedroom he had shared for all of his known life and saw that two beds now occupied space on opposite walls and a hole like a wound had sunk into the place their bed existed only days ago, he failed to make a single sound.

Mycroft waited.

Sherlock had demanded, insulted, rationalized, and then when all this was battered as ineffective as rain upon a windowpane, he had broken down. He had pleaded as part of the world he had created for himself with its silent rules was destroyed. Children do that to protect themselves, adults even. Humans.

We create myths to keep us safe. There are the simple superstitious myths we laugh at and share freely as useless impersonal thoughts.

Don’t step on a crack.

Don’t walk under a ladder.

But there are the myths we tell ourselves. The lies we whisper so quietly that sometimes even we fail to hear them.

If I just do not have that cigarette then she will not die today.

If I take the long way to work and do not pass the place I had my accident I will be safe.

If I keep the idea of my brother alive I will never have to acknowledge that he is never coming back.

Sherlock who has the mind of a scientist or a philosopher, the knowledge of an adult, and the emotional capacity of a child never had a chance of knowing the myths he told himself.

An orange blanket that is frayed and not as vibrant as it once was but that is soft to the touch will protect you from all manner of evil.

Hiding food when the very idea of chewing and swallowing causes your heart to quicken counts as eating as long as no one find out, because the smiles you earn are just as real.

Knowing the pulse of John’s heart and the cadence of his breath while he sleeps is knowledge so helplessly intimate that no one else in the world could lay a claim more legitimate or intense.

And being the first thing John sees in the morning and the last thing he thinks about at night is the unspoken promise that no matter who occupies his waking hours he will always begin and end with Sherlock.

As long as they share a bed John will not leave him all alone.

Which is why it has to end.

It is unique to watch, singular developmentally in the debate of nature verses nurture; a lifetime ago Sherlock had trouble seeing anyone as useful let alone necessary. A human heart behind brick and mortar walls, ‘alone is what keeps me safe’.

And now, that same nature, that same irreparable heart, was paralyzed by fear that he would be left alone.

And now a few self-deluding myths apropos of nothing were adequate to bring him to tears. To make it feel as if it were his life on the line. Or more to the truth, that his reason to live was being taken away.

He could not let Sherlock delude himself into thinking John would stay with him simply by virtue of being the one to count his heartbeats.

He could not put that weight on John.

The full jealous force of Sherlock’s great heart was something that needed to be guided with the same care of his great intellect.

And when they emerged from the death of their self-delusions, their safe guards against loss, and found they were not alone they would be closer than ever before. They would know that it was not superstition and ritual that held them together, not continuous proximity, but something invisible and significantly stronger.

Even in this lifetime the guidance of Sherlock’s errant heart would not rest long in Mycroft’s possession.

John looked at the two beds in their room without outwardly changing expression. His brown eyes were a calm careful blank but there was an internal shift, an understanding of what was taking place instead of a disregarding of an inconsequential change.

The dinosaur bag across his shoulder slipped down to hang in the crook of his elbow. Without skipping a beat John swung it into his arms and walked over to one of the beds as if it had been his aim all along and he had gotten caught up by a momentary fancy. He tossed his things on the light blue bedspread the way travelers might dismissively claim a hotel bed and flashed Mycroft a broad beaming smile that did not reach his careful blank eyes. He marched out the door without a backward look. Sherlock stood in the room with a look of surprise that quickly melted into delight, and with a parting nod to Mycroft, ran after John

This was war.

The twin beds had been arranged over the holiday away and they themselves had arrived home in the morning, their group having to disband to various places of work. Additionally there were no plans for the day, no tutors coming, no trips into the city, not even a sanctioned activity and Mycroft’s work had piled up abominably.

The boys had the advantage of him.

Before breakfast every cushion in the flat had been conscripted as building material for a fort of epic proportions in the living room. This includes any and all cushions which cannot be removed from their respective furniture pieces.

As first strikes go it was mild. Acceptable even.

Mycroft let it lull him into a false sense of bravado and security.

Within the hour which Mycroft had used for a really quite necessary conference call, every solitary curtain had been removed and the hanging parts left to dangle from the windows like bleached bones. The curtains disappeared into the depths of the fort which had by this point been booby trapped. The obvious entryways were ‘locked’ with cumbersome items, a hindrance for adults whom lack the dexterity shared by spider monkeys and children and more…interestingly with noxious homemade gasses made to disgust rather than harm, small electrical shock devices, and darts of pen ink that launched with trip wires and soaked into clothing with astounding ease as quickly became evidence on Mycrofts wardrobe.

I was childish, effective, and intelligent.

Two sets of eyes peered out of the depths of fabric and cushion, a fort with the look of a fairytale castle. Certainly magic must play some part in keeping it upright and twisted so.

“Hullo Mycroft.” Johns brown eyes blinked and opened again too widely, framed by red above and faded yellow below, the fabric cinched around the peek hole. His voice too sharp and happy. “You can’t try to break in now, we are still working and we are in the middle of a delicate process right now.”

Pale blue eyes turned away from the peek hole, clearly more interested in the boy at his side. Soft breathy laughter matched the way his eyes closed and opened again. Sherlock was taking a back seat in this rebellion. He was enjoying it. The implications of love for him, the joy of annoying Mycroft, the way the little blond with the simple smile could be so incredibly…unique.

This was Johns show.

“Maybe you should go back to work, you did seem to miss it while we were gone.” The voice was unchanged and friendly as if he were being asked to tea. But John had chosen not to hide completely, he had not ducked down or pulled the blank mask over his face. If this were an invitation to tea Mycroft would have had to decline. Arsenic is so unpleasant when trying to have something as civilized as tea.

John meant it to hurt. The implication and the accusation were clear but his voice was the perfect counterbalance of angelic child to just a hint of malice. Cutting with a knife so sharp you do not realize until you are bleeding that you have been cut.

For their own good.

This was for their own good.

He nodded at John shortly, nothing more than an acknowledgement, and he left them to it.

By lunch a flag had been erected in the middle of their fort. A pilfered curtain dyed bright shock orange, the lace torn away and the skull beaming from its center, their silent watchman in spilled pen ink and flanked by two inky handprints.

Lunch was a negotiation.

Mrs. Hudson refused to take his calls, pretending to not know how to answer and hanging up over and over again with an ‘whoops!’, Lestrade told him to fix his own mess, and Harry, texted in a weak moment, wished him the best of luck in an oddly sincere message, against the ex-military child with a grudge and a protective streak. She did not sound hopeful.

Mycroft wanted them to eat.

John wanted nothing.

Everyone wanted Sherlock to eat.

Sherlock wanted permission to leave the fort to use the restroom, but was at loathing to miss anything.

They ended in a forced silence in the kitchen. John watching the food preparation from his place at the table where his military demeanor was at odds with the way his feet did not touch the ground. Mycroft adopted a pleasantly oblivious demeanor and Sherlock quickly escaped to the WC.

Fried cheese sandwiches grew cold on their plates and the milk warm as they waited for Sherlock.

The water in the bathtub began, inexplicably, to run, the sound of water rushing past the kitchen and into where the room Sherlock had apparently gotten lost in. Mycroft decided to hazard a chance at breaking their unspoken cold war reenactment.

“It doesn’t change anything. He still loves you.” Brown eyes flashed to him, losing their 1000 mile gaze and fixing coldly onto his face. Mycroft found himself wanting to fidget.

“I know.” John’s lips thinned into a hard line and all of the warmth that had been forced into his voice before was strikingly absent. “And you can also tell me that we are too old to share now, that big boys sleep alone. I know.”

He was so small. Even for his age, for a child, he was small. Sweet and round-faced and ash blond and always full of smiles and laughter but right now John did not even need to be able to touch the floor to fill up the whole room.

“But that isn’t us. We aren’t normal.” His hands splayed on the table top, fingers scratching at the wood. “Everyone knows, they talk about it when they think we cannot hear them, even our friends.” Brown eyes were cold and hard and world weary and betrayed all at once and his voice was devoid of inflection as the worlds were said with deliberate crisp enunciation.

“Strange. Creepy. Alien. Freaks. They don’t know what we are and neither do we, but we are different Mycroft.” His hands curled into fists so tightly that when they released Mycroft expected blood to run free. His brown eyes reflected the pain and horror and suffering and utter hopelessness Sherlock had only days before. “What if we need this?”

The water stopped in its rush through the pipes. A burst of laughter trickled down the hallway and wet feet slapped across wooden flooring in something closer to a lopping run than a walk.

The conversation died as Sherlock stepped into the doorway with a beaming face breaking smile that crinkled his eyes and bunched his cheeks and gleaming in a way that meant something for someone has gone horribly awry. His curls dripped discolored water onto the floor, past his bare chest with patches of blue around his neck and past the hand clutching the stained blue towel around his naked waist.

He turned to John.

Sherlock dashed forward to stand at Johns chair and when he got no reaction shook his curls wetly so that they sprayed around his beaming face.

“You said I look good in blue.” A blue tinged water droplet caught in his eyelashes and then fell down his cheek in a streak. He reached up with the hand not holding his already precarious towel and ran it through his gleaming dark blue hair. “Now I am always in blue.”

Johns mouth opened but had yet to curl into a smile or a frown, his anger at Mycroft leaving him hollow and reeling.

“Not good?” Sherlock asked carefully.

John finally laughed, weak at first and then building into honest joy, tumbling off the chair and sinking his hands into Sherlock’s curls, his hands and wrists staining blue.

“You look beautiful.” He told him sincerely, shaking his head as he lifted the curls to reveal Sherlocks decidedly smurf-like neck and blue tiger striped forehead. He pushed away the dark blue curl that fell into his eye and tucked it away behind his ear.

“But you look beautiful just the way you always are too.”

Mycroft’s work was abandoned for the next hour and a half. John and he called a temporary truce and they met outside the bathroom like two generals from opposing sides who had accidentally married into the same family. Sherlock beaming, blue, dripping, and half naked between them.

The tension dissipated slightly he shucked his coat, rolled up the sleeves of his shirt, and sat on the water saturated side of the bath, abandoning his normally impeccable attire to disaster and causing Sherlock to let out a surprised giggle at the debauchery.

John, in a slightly rebellious move, that was similarly an act of anarchy and peace, toed off his shoes and climbed into the tub with Sherlock fully dressed, soap bubbles clinging to his top. When Mycroft simply nodded his acceptance of the move the truce was solidified and for the hour and half they spent scrubbing the blue from Sherlock’s skin they were nothing more than allies, holding Sherlock’s hair out of his eyes as they lathered him with soap, sharing sponges as Sherlock was forced to submit to them utterly, letting his head fall forward and all his hair tumble down and away from his blue shoulders.

His skin in the end was very nearly white and only patched with stubborn blue, particularly his right ear which remained obstinately vibrant. His hair-

Mycroft wrapped his arms around the little boys waist and hoisted him up, balanced and held against his chest to gaze in the mirror over the sink.

Sherlock whipped his hair back and forth, tumbling damp curls against Mycroft’s chest.

His hair had always been dark but now when it moved and caught the light blue shimmed within the twists of hair. He let out another laugh and his eyes moved up the mirror to Mycroft.

“No. Absolutely not. It’s one thing to dye your own head blue, you will leave mine alone.” He held the little boy tighter in his arms until Sherlock pulled a face of annoyance and playful affection. “And not Johns hair either.” Sherlock looked as if he might be debating the merits of doing just that. It was cheating of course, and Sherlock could see right through him but that hardly mattered.

“Unless you think John needs to change?”

Sherlock squirmed and wriggled and after a moment and a single lifted eyebrow Mycroft let him slip to the ground.

“No.” Sherlock said directly to John, hand ghosting over his blond hair and then falling away untouched. “He is perfect.”

Food, cold and supplemented with an assortment of biscuits, was taken into the fort and presumed eaten. Or experimented on. Hard to tell.

Midafternoon the fort was finished and the truce abandoned.

Any attempt at breaching the perimeter would turn out rather poorly, he was informed when he squeezed himself into the doorway and stood flush against the wall, the fort reaching out to brush his chest. John explained sweetly, so Mycroft would only have to suffer the ill effects if he chose to do so, the new traps. It was quite clever. Each layer of fort was reinforced with Sherlock’s pervasively blue dye and an assortment of confidential and highly convoluted work papers.

He could print them all out again, hardly anything is only on paper in this century, but John had not only found his safe, broken into it, bypassed the biometrics and the fact that he was simply too short for the entire endeavor, and then slipped papers from each file.

There was no way Mycroft could know where data was missing from.

One spill would mean the whole safe, all of the notes in the margins, all of the messages, would be a wash.

John blinked sweetly at him through his arrow hole.

He had made note of each place, he could put them all back just as he had found it, as if it had never been touched at all.

But Mycroft really should back out of the room. Immediately. Carefully.

Sherlock made a sound from within reminiscent of a teenage girl with a crush, of an art student finding themselves tripping through the dark and tumbling suddenly face to face with the Mona Lisa.

Mycroft knew when to employ a tactical retreat.

He edged out of the room without turning his back, burning brown eyes watching his every step with narrowed eyebrows.

He was actually quite proud. Terrified and feeling vaguely like Dr. Frankenstein, but proud.

Mummy would be so pleased.

Supper was a predictable con, really he had been hoping for better from them. But it was effective, and had the sort of brutal efficiency that meant that they would not be able to hold out for forever.

It was John who spoke, this time coming all the way to the mouth of his fortress, letting it spill open to reveal him, shoulders back, head held high. It pained him to use this trump card.

“We will not be eating. We are at a critical stage and cannot abandon our foothold.” He gazed up expressionless. Blunt, yes, but gracefully executed.

‘We’ and not ‘Sherlock’. No direct mention of the trump at all. A plausible excuse not directly hindering their ability to eat and leaving out the obvious solution with the double effect of not making it a demand, still a cold war then, and the added bonus of allowing the enemy to believe they had a thought of their own. A slip up however, a worrying one. Foothold.

“I suppose you might be able to manage if something was brought to you?”

Johns smile was plastic explosives. “We might be able to, yes.”

A/N: Back from the Hiatus! Hope you enjoy!