Fic: A Tautology of Little Brothers
Title: A Tautology of Little Brothers
Word Count: 1600
Genre: Character Study, Introspection, mild angst
Rating: PG 13 (violence)
Warnings: Nongraphic depictions of child abuse. Mutilation.
Characters: Mycroft, Sherlock
Summary: A little brother, in and of himself.
A/N: Thanks, as always, to scarletjedi for having the wisdom which I do not and being an awesome beta. She, it should be said, actually wrote the summary.
A Tautology of Little Brothers
Do you ever wonder if there’s something wrong with us?
No, dear brother. Because I knew you from the first. I have watched you since the beginning and have observed you learning and fashioning your opinions of the world. Your coldness is nothing but emulation. You learned it young, as you did most things, and practiced it to perfection, but you learned it nonetheless.
It was through your own desires to be like your older brother, whom you looked up to as I have never seen you look up to anyone since. It was because you wanted to be like me.
I know you remember, Sherlock, however hard you try to forget. You called me ‘Captain’, (to my tremendous irritation at the time) for three months straight. You thought me composed and calculating and the perfect example of all your underdeveloped philosophies. You believed that I was capable of anything.
And how disappointed you were when you discovered you were right.
The man could not have been allowed to continue. He was a menace, not just to mother, but to you. You were six the first time and I found you behind the wine cabinet with a washcloth to your nose and a bowl in your lap to keep the blood from dripping onto the floor. I could have put a letter opener through his eye. I would have, if there had been one handy when I cornered the bastard in his office.
But you had it already. You had palmed it when he threw you against the corner of the desk because you feared, if he saw such an obvious tool, he would use it against you. You had it up your sleeve when he bashed you across the face with the third volume of the bloody Oxford English Dictionary. And it stabbed halfway through your wrist when you put your arm out to catch yourself as you tripped on the broken lamp stand after he told you to get out of his sight.
Not once did it occur to you to raise the thing in self-defense. You still had it when I found you, it was placed in the bowl with the blood.
“What did you do?” were the first words out of my mouth as I crouched before you. It cannot be used as an excuse, but I was young, I did not understand the significance of words and implied meanings with children. You must have believed I was faulting you for what he did. In truth, I was simply chagrined by my own lack of foresight, that I had not predicted he would act out against you. All I could think about was discovering what the catalyst had been so that I could prevent a future attack.
But you looked up at me, half embarrassed to be caught in such a vulnerable position, and rested your head back against the wall. “I believe I offended him,” you said.
Your nose was broken and your eye had become so swollen that by the next morning you couldn’t see out of it. I let you borrow one of my handkerchiefs and you tied it over the left side of you face. When Mother asked about it you told her you wanted to be a pirate when you grew up. She was delighted. She laughed and later confided in me that perhaps we should buy you a model of a sailing ship to put together when the rain kept you indoors.
I waited until the man was sober and confronted him in his study. I made sure both you and mother were well out of the house before I locked us both behind the heavy oak door and made him sit at his desk. The evidence-scuff marks, inefficiently cleaned bloodstains-was all over the carpet. I knocked over his decanter of brandy as a blind before mother could discover it and arrive at her own conclusions.
He confessed, shame face, that you had called him an “embezzler”, a word you must have heard from my mouth, and that in his fear and rage he beat you. The man cried, face in his hands, as he admitted his crime.
Until that moment I had never believed in evil.
“Never again,” he promised me. As they always do.
The next time you were nine. He whipped you with the horse trainer’s riding crop. You were tied, feverish and dizzy, to the iron wheel of the old antique plow in the back of the barn. I arrived in time to interrupt the act that day, and I heard the cracking of the leather and your labored breathing the moment I opened the door. Not a tear was on your face little brother, but your skin was white. Beneath the plow, hidden in the shadows, was a harvester’s scythe. It had been knocked from its nail in the violence of your struggle. No doubt you had noticed and kicked it away before he could see it and think to cut your throat open. You kicked it away where you could not reach it either.
I had to help you peel your shirt from your back where the seeping welts had crusted it to your skin.
I have never in my life made the same mistake twice. He promised me, as he had the first time, through tears and a red face, that he would never lay his hands on you again.
I cut off his thumbs.
The scythe was the wrong shape. So I used a wood saw from the wall. It was only afterwards, when I had advised him to run along and tell our mother to call the ambulance for him, as I wiped my hands clean, that I saw you had disobeyed my instructions to return to the house and were still sitting by the plow. You must have been freezing, for your clothes were in tatters and we had already removed your shirt. But there you sat, cradling your bruised wrists, watching me with the clearest and sharpest gray eyes.
I could see in the twist of your mouth how disappointed you were in me.
All lives end. All hearts are broken.
“He has the advantage now,” you said. “He can use this to control you. If he tells anyone you are ruined.” Your entire body was shaking and on the point of collapse, but you were calm, you were composed. My God boy, you were like glass. You broke my heart with those words. I couldn’t know if I had made you, somehow, into such a machine, or if you had been born with certain deficiencies.
I was not, I have never been, sentimental, but I wanted to gather you in my arms and cradle your head beneath my chin. I wanted you to cry, like a normal boy, so that I could comfort you.
You had warmth, Sherlock, as a child. Your coldness was learned. But I am still unsure of your heart’s other qualities.
Caring is not an advantage, little brother. But I wonder what is wrong with me that I allowed you to become as you are. That I pulled back that curtain for you, when you were young, and showed you the cogs and wheels behind existence. The naughty shadows and hushed up back stage secrets, the key to humanity’s illusions. Caring is what shapes evil deeds. I cut my own father’s thumbs from his hands because I cared for you, because I desired him never to hold a crop, or a knife, or a handful of your hair again. Caring is not an advantage, but it is, almost universally, a shared shortcoming.
I do sometimes wonder what is wrong in you. For our faults, whatever they are, are not collective. I am capable and calculating. A student of Jeremy Bentham and John Stewart Mill, and I will seek always to achieve the greatest good for the greatest number. I accepted long ago that such a philosophy has consequences. But there are exceptions to every rule.
There is very little, whatever you are, that I would not do for you, Sherlock. I would lie to my government and my queen. I would commit patricide, both metaphorical and literal. I would bury my own morals and cheerfully wave them goodbye. But I do not understand you.
I can perceive your thoughts and predict your movements. But your motivations are mysterious to me.
xxx
What may we deduce about his heart?
We may deduce that he has desires, and a conscience, perhaps; or a facsimile of one.
What worries me is his lack of hate. He has every reason to hate the man who beat him, whipped him, and abused his mother. But I have never heard him make a judgment one way or the other on our father’s character. And though his reaction all those years ago to my crime was one of disappointment and anger, he did not hate me for it.
Hate is the correlative of love. Whatever our esteemed literary figures would have the public believe, there is no such being in which one can exist without the other. The converse must also be true. And we may deduce that if Sherlock is incapable of hate he is also incapable of love.
Though I do wonder if our premise is not somehow flawed. My sources tell me that Sherlock nearly took a bullet for John Watson. That is almost irrefutably a practical demonstration of love.
And I have said myself that every rule has its exception. And Sherlock is certainly exceptional.
fin