Break His Fingers, He Won't Play the Piano No More (3/?)tawabidsMay 28 2011, 13:00:12 UTC
He throws himself into his work with a vigour that surprises his subordinates. He wants to be distracted, but it is not enough. His mind continues to dwell on that dank basement, on the harsh light of a bare bulb, on the sound his palm made as it connected with John’s cheek.
The text two days later is like the craved coffee. He drives out to the Baking House, and tries to act serene.
“He says he’ll only speak to you,” Anthea reports brightly, proud to have done her job.
“I hope this is worth my time, John,” Mycroft says, inspecting his nails.
The good doctor is on the floor today, not even cuffed. It’s not as if he’ll be walking anywhere. Not on what’s left of his feet.
“I need to talk to you in private,” John doesn’t lift his head. His eyes are glassy, staring at Mycroft’s shoes.
“Come out with it. We’re all friends here,” Mycroft insists. He pokes John’s ribs with his umbrella and the good doctor whimpers and folds into himself like a sea anemone. A fair comparison. He does not deserve to be treated like a human any more.
“Only to you,” he insists.
“Oh, I don’t think so,” Mycroft smirks. “I’ve read about how you escaped Kandahar despite the bullet in your shoulder. I don’t intend to be alone with you at any point, so please, come out with it.”
John inhales a long, staggering breath, pressing his temple into the cold concrete. “It’s all true,” he whispers. “Everything you said.”
“And Moriarty?”
John shuts his eyes, opens them to stare once more at the shine of black leather over Mycroft’s toes. “He saved my life. Years ago. I promised him I owed him a favour, anything he needed. When I got back to London he… he contacted me, told me the favour was Sherlock Holmes. So I did what I do best. I earned his trust,” his eyes slide up at last to Mycroft’s face.
Mycroft feels as if inside him is a very long tunnel to the centre of the earth, and at the bottom of the tunnel is fire, and the fire is racing upwards. He barely manages to keep his voice steady as he says, “Where is Sherlock Holmes?”
John’s head moves almost imperceptibly. “I don’t know.”
The fire pours out the mouth of the tunnel and fills Mycroft to the brim. He turns and walks away. “Continue,” he barks to Anthea.
---
When she next flicks him a text, it is three days later and the same message, “HE’LL ONLY SPEAK TO YOU.”
Mycroft has his men bring him a chair and he settles himself on it. John is sitting upright against the back wall of the basement, his legs folded underneath him, his broken arm held close to his chest like some animal he has rescued.
“Well?” Mycroft asks.
John croaks. “Do you promise you’ll kill me, after I tell you?”
“Of course. I’m a man of my word.”
John takes a breath. “He got too close to Moriarty. I waited until the meat works in Surrey were on strike. I put twenty-five milligrams of nitrazepam in his tea, disguised the taste with extra sugar. When he was too wobbly to fight back I held a plastic bag over his face until he stopped breathing. I put his clothes in the laundry, took the body to the meatworks, dismembered it there, minced the meat and put it in their garbage disposal. It would all have been cleared and destroyed when the strike finished the next day. The head and bones might have been recognised as human, so I bribed a crematorium janitor to let me in after hours, and I used their facilities to burn them and crush them up, then scattered the ashes in the Thames.”
He fell silent.
Mycroft clutched the handle of his umbrella. Like his brother, he was possessed of a vivid imagination. He could not switch off the pictures in his mind, the perception of being suffocated by thin plastic, the ache of betrayal that Sherlock would have felt, the images of his baby brother’s naked corpse being hacked up with an electric meat saw, of blood splattering across John’s face and torso. Anthea’s hand touched Mycroft’s shoulder, massaging gently until the rage had passed and he could trust himself to move.
He stood up, looked down at the good doctor, and said, “I don’t believe you.”
He headed for the door. “Continue,” he said to Anthea.
Re: Break His Fingers, He Won't Play the Piano No More (3/?)tawabidsMay 29 2011, 02:35:01 UTC
Why doesn't this have a million comments? This is amazing! And Mycroft, even though he thinks letting things get personal is a weakness, is so much fucking scarier when he's emotionally involved.
OMG!!!!!! YAY! I didn't think this was going to get filled, and with such skill. I love the first three parts and am literally breathless with anticipation for whatever comes next. Thank you!
Break His Fingers, He Won't Play the Piano No More (4/?)tawabidsMay 29 2011, 07:18:12 UTC
He does not go back to the Baking House for some time. Anthea texts on occasion to report no progress. John is sticking to his story, despite the sleep deprivation and slow starvation. Perhaps Mycroft underestimated his loyalty to Moriarty. Perhaps John will expire before he gives up the truth.
Or Perhaps Baby Brother really is dead.
Mycroft forces himself to focus on diplomacy and the United Nations, on pruning the budget and weeding out corruption. He focuses on starting new projects and maintaining old connections. He starts drinking coffee again. He does not think about the Baking House.
One of his protégés in Toronto sends him a lovely postcard from the zoo with a monkey-eating eagle on the front. Mycroft receives it with his usual pile of mail and flips it over.
He frowns. The name at the bottom is Sam Fendalton, yes, but the handwriting is not Sam’s. She once took a vow of silence for a month during her Buddhist phase and communicated only in post-its, so Mycroft remembers her slim style very well. The text is innocuous enough - ‘Hey Boss, all’s well here, saw this eagle on a visit with the governor general and it made me think of you…’ etcetera, etcetera.
Mycroft looks at the postcard for a long time. The handwriting is unfamiliar, but not entirely alien. So it is someone Mycroft knows, trying to disguise their own writing. And then it hits Mycroft.
It is his baby brother’s hand.
He scans the message again, puts together the clues from the way certain numbers in the postcode are emphasised, rips a piece of notepad off and begins to decode the words letter by letter. When he gets halfway through the last word, he stops. The two-hundred-quid fountain pen slips from his fingers and rolls across the desk. Mycroft’s breath has stopped.
The message reads, dont wOrry abouT me Worry a* aNth.
“Don’t worry about me,” Mycroft’s breath returns with the words, but it is hard to get them out. He knows that Sherlock meant him to recognise the half-disguised handwriting. “Worry about Anthea.”
---
What tipped her off, Mycroft doesn’t know, but his dear lady, the best assistant he has ever had, is gone by the time he tries to summon her from the Baking House. His men are confused, saying she is already on her way to him, but she never arrives. She will be in Prague by now, or Budapest or Tianjin.
There is a private hospital in Chelsea which is normally reserved for international VIPs and visiting heads of states. Mycroft has John ferried there immediately by his personal staff. He is already doing a personal scan of their recent reports and expenses, searching for anything amiss that could indicate Anthea was not the only mole in his retinue. Any one of them could kill John if they wanted before he reaches the hospital, but that is a risk Mycroft will have to take, because he has to trust someone, even when there is no one trustworthy.
He brings in a clinician he met in Chechnya who has experience rehabilitating victims of starvation and torture. John is kept under sedation for a day while several of Mycroft’s personal physicians reset bones, check for serious internal haemorrhages and do their best to cosmetically repair John’s feet. Mycroft has them carefully time the sedatives so that he can be there when John wakes up.
Break His Fingers, He Won't Play the Piano No More (5/?)tawabidsMay 29 2011, 07:20:00 UTC
John’s eyes are those of a cornered predator. He doesn’t move, except to glance around the room. Mycroft sees him take in the exits, the latched windows, and various objects - his IV line, a heavy vase of flowers, the spare chair - which he could use as a weapon in a pinch.
“Good morning,” Mycroft says, folding away his newspaper. “Or evening, rather. How are you feeling?”
“I suppose ‘I’m sorry’ is too much for you, is it?” John snarls. His throat is still raw, by the sound of it.
“I’m sorry,” Mycroft says. He doesn’t mean it, not in the way John wants him to mean it, he is not sorry for what he has done. He was only trying to save his baby brother. But he is regretful, he wishes they were not in this position. He wishes John did not need the morphine drip or the metal screws in his arm.
John does not acknowledge the apology anyway. He watches Mycroft, his lips pressed hard together, but his eyes are shoving that question back in Mycroft’s face. Where is Sherlock Holmes?
“I don’t know where he is, exactly,” Mycroft clears his throat, tucks the newspaper under his arm. “But he got me a message that indicates he’s safe. I won’t send my staff to look for him, not if there is any chance Moriarty has infiltrated any further than Anthea.”
“I tried to warn you that we worked for the same criminal,” John bursts out.
“I know.”
“Why didn’t you just listen to me? I never knew where Sherlock was. After I got the kill order from Moriarty, we agreed it was safer I know nothing, in case Moriarty realised I’d faked Sherlock’s death. I expected to be at his mercy, not yours. If you’d given me ten seconds to speak to you alone, you might have caught her before she disappeared. Now she’ll be going after Sherlock.”
“I expect she will.”
“He’ll never forgive you when he learns what you’ve done.”
“Perhaps not.”
John turned away. “Don’t come near me again. You heard how I escaped Kandahar. You know I’ll kill you.”
“I wouldn’t blame you,” says Mycroft, and sees himself out.
---
Mycroft no longer feels safe even when he is sitting in his own office. Suppose his secretary is working for one of those Chinese splinter groups that kept threatening him last year? Suppose one of the interns he so loved to mentor was passing information to Moriarty right now? Suppose Alfred Bates, his contact in M16, decided to walk in and blow Mycroft away? He had known Alfred for sixteen years, had gone to cricket matches with him and commiserated over names for his children. He could not imagine Alfred so much as cheating at checkers.
And yet Anthea had been born to two decorated British veterans and had once foiled an assassination attempt by pushing Mycroft out of the way of a speeding car, breaking her pelvis. Anthea had stayed in the office on late nights just to keep him company when she could have been out on the town or home in a warm bath. Anthea had asked him to be her sperm donor if she turned thirty-two without any sign of marriage in her future. He had trusted Anthea completely and now he wanted to strangle her with his own hands. How could his mind concentrate on his work and always be on guard, how could he carry on without any faith in people? He would go mad.
Break His Fingers, He Won't Play the Piano No More (6/?)tawabidsMay 29 2011, 07:25:17 UTC
Mycroft puts a full surveillance detail on John once he leaves the hospital. To his mild surprise, John returns to Baker St, though how he explains his absence and injuries to his landlady Mycroft cannot fathom. Perhaps he tells her the truth. Mycroft has a great deal of respect for the emotional strength of elderly women. Grand Nan Holmes spent much of World War Two smuggling information in and out of the Wolfsschanze. She used to tell Mycroft and Sherlock about her time there as bedtime stories.
But surveillance reports are not enough. Mycroft has made this personal, and that was why he made mistakes, that was why Anthea got away, that was why Sherlock will never forgive him if he ever learns what Mycroft has done.
Mycroft decides he needs John to forgive him.
He manages to get Mrs Hudson to invite him in, so John probably hasn’t told her anything after all. She makes him tea and sits him down in the living room of the upstairs flat, offering him a plate of digestive biscuits. He takes one with a smile even though his dietician has barred him from chocolate.
John arrives home a few minutes later. It takes him a long time to get up the stairs: he is still on crutches. He stops in the doorway when he sees Mycroft sitting in Sherlock’s chair with a digestive in one hand and Mrs Hudson perched on the sofa beside him.
John clears his throat, “Would you mind leaving us alone, Mrs Hudson?”
Her brows pinch together but she clicks her tongue. “I’ll leave the tea and biscuits and make myself scarce. You pour yourself a cup, dear.”
Mycroft watches John put one crutch aside, limp into the kitchen, reach into cupboard and bring out his handgun. He walks back into the living room, checking the magazine and flicking off the safety. He points it at the centre of Mycroft’s forehead.
“Give me one reason why I shouldn’t,” he says quietly.
“Well, Dr Watson, I wouldn’t very well be able to get you off a murder charge if I were dead,” Mycroft says, making a face as if he has just eaten a bad oyster. “Besides, think of the mess.”
“I’m having to learn to write again. Nerve damage to my left hand is so bad.”
“I’m happy to pay for physical therapy, if you like.”
“I don’t want your charity.”
“But I would like yours,” Mycroft says smoothly. He waits for John to shift on the remaining crutch, cock his head a little, and finally draw back the gun and empty it before putting it aside.
“I want to apologise properly,” Mycroft says, steepling his fingers above his lap. “I allowed my emotions to cloud my judgement. I wronged you.”
“I don’t believe you have emotions. You’re a bloody automaton,” John says, shuffling over to the chair across from Mycroft and lowering himself into it.
For a while, they sit silently watching each other, and then John asks, “Any news of Sherlock?”
“He’s keeping his head down, even from me,” Mycroft replies.
“Good.”
“Well?” Mycroft raises his eyebrows. “Do you accept my apology?”
“Nope,” John says with a twist of his head. “Now get out of my house.”
Break His Fingers, He Won't Play the Piano No More (7/?)tawabidsMay 29 2011, 22:17:33 UTC
I'm going to be away for a few days, so I'll post the end of this now, though I know it's not terribly well edited. Thank you for everyone who's still hanging around reading! :)
Rumours with a likely basis in fact flit across Mycroft’s desk. Sherlock is not only very much alive, he has started pursuing Moriarty in earnest, targeting various nodes of his network around Europe and bringing them to the attention of local authorities. It is a haphazard, inefficient crusade but it is still effective. Sherlock is putting holes in the hornet’s nest, one pinprick at a time.
Mycroft doesn’t intrude on 221b again, but he keeps the surveillance on John. And it is lucky that he does. Three months later, Moriarty makes a valiant attempt to finish what Mycroft started at the Baking House, and the surveillance team has to call in backup before they plunge after John.
Mycroft finds himself clutching the door handle as his car races to the scene. He cannot help but think of nerve damage and crutches and how desperate Moriarty must be if he honestly thinks John knows where Sherlock Holmes is hiding. The criminal may do something reckless.
By the time he reaches the derelict wool factory where Mycroft’s forces intercepted Moriarty’s, the fight is over. John is lying against an old laundry press with a blanket around him. He is unhurt, but he hauls himself to his feet as Mycroft approaches and tries to throw a punch.
Mycroft lets it land, but turns with it so the sting is only mild. As John regains his balance, Mycroft drops his umbrella and grabs the smaller man. In front of his whole team, he drags the good doctor into his chest and holds him there until John stops struggling.
“You bastard,” John’s voice moans against his chest. “I could have got away on my own, you bastard, I don’t need your help.”
In his voice, Mycroft can hear the unspoken reason for the fury and fear; I thought you’d done it again. I thought I was going back into that basement.
“Dr Watson,” Mycroft says, cutting across John’s anxiety, and steps back so that he can see the man’s face. “I want to speak to you alone.”
“No way. You didn’t give me ten seconds, you don’t get anything from me. I’m going home, I don’t want to look at you a moment longer,” John turns and begins to hobble towards the crutches that the surveillance team picked up for him out of the gutter where Moriarty’s men grabbed him.
Mycroft picks up his umbrella, clicks his fingers to tell his team to begin cleaning up and follows the good doctor. John does not acknowledge his presence as they wend their way between industrial looms towards the exit. The tin roof of the factory is ringing like a percussion band; it is pouring outside. John pauses in the awning, next to an ashtray on a pole where workers once hovered on their smoke breaks.
“I’ll get you a driver,” Mycroft says.
John tilts his head to look back over his shoulder. The outside light glints off waterfalls just in front of his face, streaming off the awning. “I’ll get a cab, thanks.”
“May I at least accompany you until then?” Mycroft taps his umbrella twice on the ground and then unfolds it with a flourish and holds it over John’s head.
Break His Fingers, He Won't Play the Piano No More (8/?)tawabidsMay 29 2011, 22:19:31 UTC
“What do you want?” John says. He sounds like an old dog that has been beaten too many times to bite any longer. He makes his way toward the main street and Mycroft keeps the umbrella perfectly centred over a point halfway between their heads.
“I want to offer you a job, as my new assistant.”
“Is that a joke?”
“Of course not.”
“Then my answer’s ‘sod off’,” John has reached the curb and sticks his head out of the circumference of the umbrella’s protection, searching for a taxi. Mycroft does not expect there to be any in the area at this time of night, but now is probably not the time to say that.
“Dr Watson,” Mycroft says. John looks at him at last. Mycroft chews on the inside of his cheek and finally says the thing he has tried not admit all these months. “You are literally the only person in the world who I can trust. You have proven yourself through torture and the threat of death. I need you by my side.”
John squints at him. “Hell of a job interview you put on. Answer’s still ‘sod off’. And I’m going to have to call a cab and wait a while, so you may as well go back to your cronies.”
“Very well,” Mycroft holds out his umbrella for John to hold.
John eyes it as if it were a live grenade. Mycroft shrugs, “I’m not leaving you to stand in the rain.”
After a long, dramatic sigh, John braces one elbow on a crutch to take the umbrella. “I’d be a terrible assistant anyway,” he says, “I type with two fingers and I don’t know how to book a flight online.”
“Oh, I think I could find some a bit more stimulating for you to do, given your skills,” Mycroft promises, raising his eyebrows. He heads off into the rain, shuddering as the drips run into the creases of his collar and down the skin inside. He supposes he probably has not felt rain on his skin for decades.
It doesn’t matter if John is reluctant right now. Mycroft is a patient man, and he will keep asking until he gets what he wants.
Re: Break His Fingers, He Won't Play the Piano No More (8/?)jesse_kipsJune 1 2011, 02:02:54 UTC
God, this is amazing. Mycroft, so creepy and harsh, and even now worried about himself and not his actions against John... and John, suffering and alone - I can't wait for Sherlock to come back and some fallout to happen!
The text two days later is like the craved coffee. He drives out to the Baking House, and tries to act serene.
“He says he’ll only speak to you,” Anthea reports brightly, proud to have done her job.
“I hope this is worth my time, John,” Mycroft says, inspecting his nails.
The good doctor is on the floor today, not even cuffed. It’s not as if he’ll be walking anywhere. Not on what’s left of his feet.
“I need to talk to you in private,” John doesn’t lift his head. His eyes are glassy, staring at Mycroft’s shoes.
“Come out with it. We’re all friends here,” Mycroft insists. He pokes John’s ribs with his umbrella and the good doctor whimpers and folds into himself like a sea anemone. A fair comparison. He does not deserve to be treated like a human any more.
“Only to you,” he insists.
“Oh, I don’t think so,” Mycroft smirks. “I’ve read about how you escaped Kandahar despite the bullet in your shoulder. I don’t intend to be alone with you at any point, so please, come out with it.”
John inhales a long, staggering breath, pressing his temple into the cold concrete. “It’s all true,” he whispers. “Everything you said.”
“And Moriarty?”
John shuts his eyes, opens them to stare once more at the shine of black leather over Mycroft’s toes. “He saved my life. Years ago. I promised him I owed him a favour, anything he needed. When I got back to London he… he contacted me, told me the favour was Sherlock Holmes. So I did what I do best. I earned his trust,” his eyes slide up at last to Mycroft’s face.
Mycroft feels as if inside him is a very long tunnel to the centre of the earth, and at the bottom of the tunnel is fire, and the fire is racing upwards. He barely manages to keep his voice steady as he says, “Where is Sherlock Holmes?”
John’s head moves almost imperceptibly. “I don’t know.”
The fire pours out the mouth of the tunnel and fills Mycroft to the brim. He turns and walks away. “Continue,” he barks to Anthea.
---
When she next flicks him a text, it is three days later and the same message, “HE’LL ONLY SPEAK TO YOU.”
Mycroft has his men bring him a chair and he settles himself on it. John is sitting upright against the back wall of the basement, his legs folded underneath him, his broken arm held close to his chest like some animal he has rescued.
“Well?” Mycroft asks.
John croaks. “Do you promise you’ll kill me, after I tell you?”
“Of course. I’m a man of my word.”
John takes a breath. “He got too close to Moriarty. I waited until the meat works in Surrey were on strike. I put twenty-five milligrams of nitrazepam in his tea, disguised the taste with extra sugar. When he was too wobbly to fight back I held a plastic bag over his face until he stopped breathing. I put his clothes in the laundry, took the body to the meatworks, dismembered it there, minced the meat and put it in their garbage disposal. It would all have been cleared and destroyed when the strike finished the next day. The head and bones might have been recognised as human, so I bribed a crematorium janitor to let me in after hours, and I used their facilities to burn them and crush them up, then scattered the ashes in the Thames.”
He fell silent.
Mycroft clutched the handle of his umbrella. Like his brother, he was possessed of a vivid imagination. He could not switch off the pictures in his mind, the perception of being suffocated by thin plastic, the ache of betrayal that Sherlock would have felt, the images of his baby brother’s naked corpse being hacked up with an electric meat saw, of blood splattering across John’s face and torso. Anthea’s hand touched Mycroft’s shoulder, massaging gently until the rage had passed and he could trust himself to move.
He stood up, looked down at the good doctor, and said, “I don’t believe you.”
He headed for the door. “Continue,” he said to Anthea.
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Brilliant, author!anon. I look forward to more!
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Thank you!
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Or Perhaps Baby Brother really is dead.
Mycroft forces himself to focus on diplomacy and the United Nations, on pruning the budget and weeding out corruption. He focuses on starting new projects and maintaining old connections. He starts drinking coffee again. He does not think about the Baking House.
One of his protégés in Toronto sends him a lovely postcard from the zoo with a monkey-eating eagle on the front. Mycroft receives it with his usual pile of mail and flips it over.
He frowns. The name at the bottom is Sam Fendalton, yes, but the handwriting is not Sam’s. She once took a vow of silence for a month during her Buddhist phase and communicated only in post-its, so Mycroft remembers her slim style very well. The text is innocuous enough - ‘Hey Boss, all’s well here, saw this eagle on a visit with the governor general and it made me think of you…’ etcetera, etcetera.
Mycroft looks at the postcard for a long time. The handwriting is unfamiliar, but not entirely alien. So it is someone Mycroft knows, trying to disguise their own writing. And then it hits Mycroft.
It is his baby brother’s hand.
He scans the message again, puts together the clues from the way certain numbers in the postcode are emphasised, rips a piece of notepad off and begins to decode the words letter by letter. When he gets halfway through the last word, he stops. The two-hundred-quid fountain pen slips from his fingers and rolls across the desk. Mycroft’s breath has stopped.
The message reads, dont wOrry abouT me Worry a* aNth.
“Don’t worry about me,” Mycroft’s breath returns with the words, but it is hard to get them out. He knows that Sherlock meant him to recognise the half-disguised handwriting. “Worry about Anthea.”
---
What tipped her off, Mycroft doesn’t know, but his dear lady, the best assistant he has ever had, is gone by the time he tries to summon her from the Baking House. His men are confused, saying she is already on her way to him, but she never arrives. She will be in Prague by now, or Budapest or Tianjin.
There is a private hospital in Chelsea which is normally reserved for international VIPs and visiting heads of states. Mycroft has John ferried there immediately by his personal staff. He is already doing a personal scan of their recent reports and expenses, searching for anything amiss that could indicate Anthea was not the only mole in his retinue. Any one of them could kill John if they wanted before he reaches the hospital, but that is a risk Mycroft will have to take, because he has to trust someone, even when there is no one trustworthy.
He brings in a clinician he met in Chechnya who has experience rehabilitating victims of starvation and torture. John is kept under sedation for a day while several of Mycroft’s personal physicians reset bones, check for serious internal haemorrhages and do their best to cosmetically repair John’s feet. Mycroft has them carefully time the sedatives so that he can be there when John wakes up.
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“Good morning,” Mycroft says, folding away his newspaper. “Or evening, rather. How are you feeling?”
“I suppose ‘I’m sorry’ is too much for you, is it?” John snarls. His throat is still raw, by the sound of it.
“I’m sorry,” Mycroft says. He doesn’t mean it, not in the way John wants him to mean it, he is not sorry for what he has done. He was only trying to save his baby brother. But he is regretful, he wishes they were not in this position. He wishes John did not need the morphine drip or the metal screws in his arm.
John does not acknowledge the apology anyway. He watches Mycroft, his lips pressed hard together, but his eyes are shoving that question back in Mycroft’s face. Where is Sherlock Holmes?
“I don’t know where he is, exactly,” Mycroft clears his throat, tucks the newspaper under his arm. “But he got me a message that indicates he’s safe. I won’t send my staff to look for him, not if there is any chance Moriarty has infiltrated any further than Anthea.”
“I tried to warn you that we worked for the same criminal,” John bursts out.
“I know.”
“Why didn’t you just listen to me? I never knew where Sherlock was. After I got the kill order from Moriarty, we agreed it was safer I know nothing, in case Moriarty realised I’d faked Sherlock’s death. I expected to be at his mercy, not yours. If you’d given me ten seconds to speak to you alone, you might have caught her before she disappeared. Now she’ll be going after Sherlock.”
“I expect she will.”
“He’ll never forgive you when he learns what you’ve done.”
“Perhaps not.”
John turned away. “Don’t come near me again. You heard how I escaped Kandahar. You know I’ll kill you.”
“I wouldn’t blame you,” says Mycroft, and sees himself out.
---
Mycroft no longer feels safe even when he is sitting in his own office. Suppose his secretary is working for one of those Chinese splinter groups that kept threatening him last year? Suppose one of the interns he so loved to mentor was passing information to Moriarty right now? Suppose Alfred Bates, his contact in M16, decided to walk in and blow Mycroft away? He had known Alfred for sixteen years, had gone to cricket matches with him and commiserated over names for his children. He could not imagine Alfred so much as cheating at checkers.
And yet Anthea had been born to two decorated British veterans and had once foiled an assassination attempt by pushing Mycroft out of the way of a speeding car, breaking her pelvis. Anthea had stayed in the office on late nights just to keep him company when she could have been out on the town or home in a warm bath. Anthea had asked him to be her sperm donor if she turned thirty-two without any sign of marriage in her future. He had trusted Anthea completely and now he wanted to strangle her with his own hands. How could his mind concentrate on his work and always be on guard, how could he carry on without any faith in people? He would go mad.
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But surveillance reports are not enough. Mycroft has made this personal, and that was why he made mistakes, that was why Anthea got away, that was why Sherlock will never forgive him if he ever learns what Mycroft has done.
Mycroft decides he needs John to forgive him.
He manages to get Mrs Hudson to invite him in, so John probably hasn’t told her anything after all. She makes him tea and sits him down in the living room of the upstairs flat, offering him a plate of digestive biscuits. He takes one with a smile even though his dietician has barred him from chocolate.
John arrives home a few minutes later. It takes him a long time to get up the stairs: he is still on crutches. He stops in the doorway when he sees Mycroft sitting in Sherlock’s chair with a digestive in one hand and Mrs Hudson perched on the sofa beside him.
John clears his throat, “Would you mind leaving us alone, Mrs Hudson?”
Her brows pinch together but she clicks her tongue. “I’ll leave the tea and biscuits and make myself scarce. You pour yourself a cup, dear.”
Mycroft watches John put one crutch aside, limp into the kitchen, reach into cupboard and bring out his handgun. He walks back into the living room, checking the magazine and flicking off the safety. He points it at the centre of Mycroft’s forehead.
“Give me one reason why I shouldn’t,” he says quietly.
“Well, Dr Watson, I wouldn’t very well be able to get you off a murder charge if I were dead,” Mycroft says, making a face as if he has just eaten a bad oyster. “Besides, think of the mess.”
“I’m having to learn to write again. Nerve damage to my left hand is so bad.”
“I’m happy to pay for physical therapy, if you like.”
“I don’t want your charity.”
“But I would like yours,” Mycroft says smoothly. He waits for John to shift on the remaining crutch, cock his head a little, and finally draw back the gun and empty it before putting it aside.
“I want to apologise properly,” Mycroft says, steepling his fingers above his lap. “I allowed my emotions to cloud my judgement. I wronged you.”
“I don’t believe you have emotions. You’re a bloody automaton,” John says, shuffling over to the chair across from Mycroft and lowering himself into it.
For a while, they sit silently watching each other, and then John asks, “Any news of Sherlock?”
“He’s keeping his head down, even from me,” Mycroft replies.
“Good.”
“Well?” Mycroft raises his eyebrows. “Do you accept my apology?”
“Nope,” John says with a twist of his head. “Now get out of my house.”
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Rumours with a likely basis in fact flit across Mycroft’s desk. Sherlock is not only very much alive, he has started pursuing Moriarty in earnest, targeting various nodes of his network around Europe and bringing them to the attention of local authorities. It is a haphazard, inefficient crusade but it is still effective. Sherlock is putting holes in the hornet’s nest, one pinprick at a time.
Mycroft doesn’t intrude on 221b again, but he keeps the surveillance on John. And it is lucky that he does. Three months later, Moriarty makes a valiant attempt to finish what Mycroft started at the Baking House, and the surveillance team has to call in backup before they plunge after John.
Mycroft finds himself clutching the door handle as his car races to the scene. He cannot help but think of nerve damage and crutches and how desperate Moriarty must be if he honestly thinks John knows where Sherlock Holmes is hiding. The criminal may do something reckless.
By the time he reaches the derelict wool factory where Mycroft’s forces intercepted Moriarty’s, the fight is over. John is lying against an old laundry press with a blanket around him. He is unhurt, but he hauls himself to his feet as Mycroft approaches and tries to throw a punch.
Mycroft lets it land, but turns with it so the sting is only mild. As John regains his balance, Mycroft drops his umbrella and grabs the smaller man. In front of his whole team, he drags the good doctor into his chest and holds him there until John stops struggling.
“You bastard,” John’s voice moans against his chest. “I could have got away on my own, you bastard, I don’t need your help.”
In his voice, Mycroft can hear the unspoken reason for the fury and fear; I thought you’d done it again. I thought I was going back into that basement.
“Dr Watson,” Mycroft says, cutting across John’s anxiety, and steps back so that he can see the man’s face. “I want to speak to you alone.”
“No way. You didn’t give me ten seconds, you don’t get anything from me. I’m going home, I don’t want to look at you a moment longer,” John turns and begins to hobble towards the crutches that the surveillance team picked up for him out of the gutter where Moriarty’s men grabbed him.
Mycroft picks up his umbrella, clicks his fingers to tell his team to begin cleaning up and follows the good doctor. John does not acknowledge his presence as they wend their way between industrial looms towards the exit. The tin roof of the factory is ringing like a percussion band; it is pouring outside. John pauses in the awning, next to an ashtray on a pole where workers once hovered on their smoke breaks.
“I’ll get you a driver,” Mycroft says.
John tilts his head to look back over his shoulder. The outside light glints off waterfalls just in front of his face, streaming off the awning. “I’ll get a cab, thanks.”
“May I at least accompany you until then?” Mycroft taps his umbrella twice on the ground and then unfolds it with a flourish and holds it over John’s head.
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“I want to offer you a job, as my new assistant.”
“Is that a joke?”
“Of course not.”
“Then my answer’s ‘sod off’,” John has reached the curb and sticks his head out of the circumference of the umbrella’s protection, searching for a taxi. Mycroft does not expect there to be any in the area at this time of night, but now is probably not the time to say that.
“Dr Watson,” Mycroft says. John looks at him at last. Mycroft chews on the inside of his cheek and finally says the thing he has tried not admit all these months. “You are literally the only person in the world who I can trust. You have proven yourself through torture and the threat of death. I need you by my side.”
John squints at him. “Hell of a job interview you put on. Answer’s still ‘sod off’. And I’m going to have to call a cab and wait a while, so you may as well go back to your cronies.”
“Very well,” Mycroft holds out his umbrella for John to hold.
John eyes it as if it were a live grenade. Mycroft shrugs, “I’m not leaving you to stand in the rain.”
After a long, dramatic sigh, John braces one elbow on a crutch to take the umbrella. “I’d be a terrible assistant anyway,” he says, “I type with two fingers and I don’t know how to book a flight online.”
“Oh, I think I could find some a bit more stimulating for you to do, given your skills,” Mycroft promises, raising his eyebrows. He heads off into the rain, shuddering as the drips run into the creases of his collar and down the skin inside. He supposes he probably has not felt rain on his skin for decades.
It doesn’t matter if John is reluctant right now. Mycroft is a patient man, and he will keep asking until he gets what he wants.
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This is just fantastic, can't wait for you to get back
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Cannot wait for more.
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