Fic: A Well Kept Secret Book Two--Mycroft
Book One--Lestrade
Book Two-Mycroft
Mycroft Holmes was absolutely not taken aback by the letter that arrived for him at school addressed in juvenile and sloppy handwriting. Surprised, yes-but not taken aback.
The only communiqués he usually received were letters from mummy meticulously written in codes such as How are your studies? (Have you made any progress on that issue of national security we couriered to you?) Are you having any troubles with your classmates? (The mole has been neutralized, please report if any others are discovered) and How is your dear Maths Professor Mr. Daniels? Are his classes enjoyable? (Thank you for reporting his suspicious activities, they have been curtailed and he has been sufficiently threatened into teaching you the proper things you need).
His father didn’t trust the phone or the post and usually showed up at odd times in person-usually at the perfect moment to intimidate Mycroft’s teachers and passive aggressively frighten his classmates. Sometimes his younger brother Sherlock tagged along with him. He was a precocious child-even at three years old (and this was compared to how advanced Mycroft had been at his age) and appeared to evaluate every move their father made on his visits to Mycroft's school.
If his parents needed to send him something of import (such as state secrets or care packages from home) they sent a trusted courier. One of Mycroft's favorite exercises was to determine how many weapons these people carried and what their previous job had been (the most amusing of the lot had been the one who had posed as a mime to gain access to private households and collect sensitive information for the government).
So when he found a letter in his cubby addressed to him in handwriting that suggested the writer had never had to spell the name Mycroft in his entire life (the y and the c were much too straight for someone with the experience writing them next to each other to have written) he stood a moment to glean what he could from the outside of the envelope alone.
He half-expected grimy fingerprints to line the cheap paper, but other than where the boy had accidentally transferred some glue from the back of the stamp to the upper right corner of the crisp rectangle with his pointer finger (or perhaps his thumb-fingerprints were not Mycroft's forte) the cheap paper was clean and unbent by anything other than the mail sorter and the postman.
Mycroft's name and address had been written in a careful and blocky handwriting that suggested the writer had never sent a letter through the post before and had been trying very hard to keep his handwriting legible. It also told Mycroft that the boy had quite deliberately foregone using joined-up-writing for some reason or another that Mycroft couldn't deduce without further information (as he tilted the envelope in his hand he mused, not for the first time, that Americans had the oddest words for some things. Cursive, honestly. What if one's handwriting made it spiky and not curved?).
The address itself had been directly copied from another sheet of paper that had been typed-judging by the letters the boy had attempted to copy from the typeset rather than just writing it the way he had been taught.
The boy's own address had been familiar enough that it had been written in a cramped hand in the upper left corner and was nearly indistinct to Mycroft's keen eyes. Nearly, he thought, because he had a particularly discerning eye when it came to handwriting. How else had he managed to read and break the code Professor Daniels had been using to pass on information that the silly rich boys Mycroft attended school with had been foolish enough to reveal in the classroom?
The name was the part that he left for last, and he was almost disappointed when he realized that (in a peculiarly adult fashion) the boy had simply penned his first initial and last name.
G. Lestrade, it said.
Well, Master Lestrade, he thought, amused, You've caught my attention.
He kept the letter firmly pinched between his thumb and fingers as he left the commons and retreated to his dormitory. The building was relatively empty and quiet as all of the other boys were taking advantage of the rare sunny day to run about outside like heathens and play games in the mud. Mycroft liked it that way because it meant he could ascend the stairs un-harassed and still in possession of his curious letter.
It was quiet upstairs as well so he sat at the small desk next to his bed to open the letter. With a moue of distaste, he slid his metal ruler under the glued down flap and prised it open. He would never understand the logic behind denying students the right to own a letter opener based on its resemblance to a weapon.
He knew a man who could kill with his thumb, accoutrements almost didn't matter.
The envelope gave way with a snick; Mycroft replaced the ruler in its proper place and returned his attention to the letter.
Hello, My name is Gregory Aiden Lestrade...
The handwriting regained its confidence once the boy had written his name. Gregory, Mycroft thought. Father would find a person with such a proper name.
The question was, what did he find this person for?
What Mycroft loved about his skills (and, presumably what the government coveted) was that he could deduce as many things about a person simply from a snippet of their writing as a lover could from a pillow confession (it was also about 100% more accurate). Normally he discovered the information he was searching for in diaries, notes, and letters to other people.
Mycroft had never had someone simply offer information about themselves to him before. It was unprecedented.
I'm twelve years old and support Arsenal. Do you like football? You didn't have any posters in your room, but you did have some books. I wanted to be surprised when your father pointed one out to me, but what kind of person doesn't like football? Not one I'd like to know, I'm sure.
Mycroft had to sit back heavily and almost let the letter fall to the desk. The boy had been in his room. Not only that, but his father had been aware of it-had, in fact, been in there with the boy. This wasn't just unprecedented. This was the beginning of the apocalypse. This boy, who simply laid out his name, location, age, and the fact that he had been freely allowed in a room with state secrets in it was obviously much more than he seemed.
His father hadn't said a word, of course.
With this new information, Mycroft could analyze the details he had gleaned from the envelope in a new light. His address had been copied in such a stilted fashion because his father had typed it out for the boy and the boy, Gregory, was almost reluctant to use it. He felt obligated, in some sort of way, but not because of Mycroft's father (otherwise there would have been quite a bit more resentment in his handwriting). The envelope had been his own, it was far too cheap to have been something his father provided, and the paper he wrote the letter itself on was as well. Which meant that though his father thought Gregory needed a little prompting, he trusted the boy to write the letter as he had been asked.
His father trusted a boy from down the village.
How...odd.
In fact, not only had Gregory not been manipulated into writing Mycroft, he wished to do so-desperately, judging by his obsessively careful treatment of the envelope and address.
There is more to this boy than it seems, Mycroft thought.
Mycroft hadn't been taken aback by the letter arriving-he had received communiqués from much stranger quarters-but he was beginning to be taken aback by the Gregory's manners and words. He called Mycroft's father loving and cheerfully admitted that he had been quite insistent upon procuring Gregory for Mycroft. How peculiar.
The things that didn't add up were that Mycroft's father had allowed Gregory to contact Mycroft without first informing his son, and that he had encouraged him to do so in the first place. Why in the world would he be interested in a village boy? Oh, Mycroft could explain in many ways way he himself would be interested in Gregory. He had an understated intelligence, wasn't too terribly slow at picking up the undercurrents, and seemed to have a talent for cutting right to the heart of the matter and acting as though he'd done nothing amazing at all.
...he thinks I could be your friend. If you like.
Indeed.
Mycroft shuffled back through the letter one more time and tried to glean as many things as he could from it. He observed how the slant to a certain letter meant that Gregory thought he was boringly normal and that he'd do nothing worthwhile with his life, but how a curve to another meant that he had a self-assuredness that most twelve year-olds did not possess. He had pride, judging by his Ps, but it was counterweighted by the modesty spoken of him in his Ns.
Gregory was a mass of contradictions.
But one thing was clear to Mycroft-if he accepted his friendship, he would have a friend for life.
After a few minutes of deliberation, he pulled out his own sheet of paper and laid pen to it.
Gregory, he began. I was quite surprised to receive your letter as my father had visited just a day ago and he had not mentioned meeting you-I presume he had his reasons, however. I was also surprised to learn that you had been to the manor. My father invited you for dinner, did he? For a proposal, I imagine. Mummy and father are always quite worried about me meeting someone at school, and if it means that they will cease pestering me about it I will happily write to you whenever you wish. I rather like to write letters, but boys our age tend to eschew them for football and other things that involve mud. Not that I don't enjoy football, but I can't imagine why you support Arsenal when everyone knows that...
Mycroft would lay aside the mystery as to why Gregory until later. If his father thought he was appropriate and safe, then Mycroft would count him as that as well. He saw no reason not to from the boy's letter.
I want to say straight off, Gregory had written, that I'm not writing to you because he's paying me, even though my parents think I am.
That didn't tell Mycroft why Gregory had written to him, but he would find out. It wouldn't be that hard, he thought. It wouldn’t be hard at all.
No, Greg wrote some days down the line, his pen digging into the paper in frustration. I hadn’t planned on Uni. Don’t see the point, really. I’ll just be a builder like my da. Could do an NVQ, I suppose, but I’ve got plenty of time to decide. Don’t need Uni to learn how to whack a hammer on a nail. What will you be when you grow up? I know you're clever-it’s brilliant, really, having such a clever friend, but what sort of thing could you do with cleverness?
Mycroft deliberated on his response for quite a while. He couldn’t very well tell Gregory that he had already been recruited by the government as some sort of underage analyst who broke codes and kept a close eye on moles. He certainly couldn’t tell Gregory that he knew more about the boy from his handwriting than from his actual written words, and he definitely wasn’t going to say that the amount of information he had gleaned was actually quite pitiful.
Well, to anyone else it would seem a respectable amount. Brilliant, even, if he went by Gregory’s terminology. But Mycroft knew that he was missing something vital about Gregory’s character. His instincts told him it wasn’t horrific or even dangerous (he also doubted Gregory would have made it past his father if it was) but he was rather curious about what the boy was hiding from him.
Obsessed with footy was an understatement, he found. Whenever Gregory felt himself on unequal footing, at a loss as to where the conversation was going, or avoiding a question, he always fell back on Arsenal.
Personally, Mycroft preferred Man U. But each to their own, he supposed.
He found that Gregory quite successfully distracted him, however, and had to fight himself to get back onto the topic of Gregory attending school. Mycroft thought it a waste of a competent mind to simply go into building. He found it horrific that someone as sharp as Gregory would willingly consign themselves to banging on things all day long and never looked forward to anything else.
The boy should at least give himself options.
No friend of mine, Mycroft wrote back, will limit himself in such a way. You’re perfectly capable of attending University in the future. In fact, I recommend it-I don’t say this to everyone I meet, I hope you realise, but you are definitely clever enough for Uni. I won’t drop the subject, I can promise you that. You will take your O-levels and then you’re A-levels and when the time comes, we’ll find the perfect Uni for you.
Hm, Mycroft thought to himself as he looked down on the sheet of paper masquerading as something innocent. Why in the world am I already thinking years ahead when we’ve only written a few times?
But then he glanced across his desk at the increasing stack of letters from Gregory and felt a smile twitch at the corner of his lips. Well, he though as he placed his pen to paper. It couldn’t hurt.
School is boring, Gregory wrote later. I finish everything ahead of everyone else and then I have nothing to do. I hate it when we have to work on everything together because everyone is so slow. Is it like this for you as well, Mycroft?
That was an excellent question, he thought, tapping his pen to his lips and ignoring the growing pile of letters slowly taking over his desk that he should really put somewhere else. Each envelope had the same careful block print pressed into it in pen, as though the person who addressed them didn’t trust the postman to read his handwriting, but the letters had increasingly relaxed handwriting that mirrored Gregory’s feelings like a pool of water.
It wouldn’t hurt, I suppose, he began to write slowly, to think of other things besides school. You’ve got a library, haven’t you? There must be one in the school at the least. If you finish ahead, read a book-find something to study. The trick of it is to always look like you’re busy with something studious…
To Mycroft’s ongoing surprise, their letters go on and on endlessly. They speak of everything-the flowers in Gregory’s garden, his brothers, Mycroft’s studies and the boys in his dorm, footy, teachers, their futures (I’d like to find myself a place with the government, Mycroft confessed one day. A place in which I have respect but not a lot of publicity), and anything else that came to mind.
Gregory began to grow, he noticed. Oh, he knew that the boy was already older than he was, and clever (not as clever as Mycroft, or even his younger brother Sherlock, of course), but he went from being a quiet mummy’s boy to a young man who wrote Mycroft with a self-assurance that leaked into his penmanship and gave him his own unique slant that spread through every word he wrote.
I’d like to go to London, someday, Gregory confessed.
If you go to Uni you can, Mycroft replied. We can go to London together.
After he had written that letter, licked the envelope, and sent it off, he realised that he had told the truth. He wanted to meet Gregory, he wanted to do brilliant things with the other boy, he wanted to see him become a man, or at least meet him when he was one. He wanted to share in his triumphs and commiserate in his defeats, he wanted to advise him through troubles and nudge him in the write direction whenever he began to steer himself wrong. He wanted to be there for Gregory-always.
I think I’d like it if you’d call me Greg, Gregory wrote in a careful sort of handwriting that Mycroft had not seen since some of his earlier letters over a year previous. No one else calls me that. Your father calls me Gregory and my da and everyone else call me Georgie (which I hate) so I think I’d like you to call me Greg.
For the first time in months Gregory was hesitant and his handwriting showed how he expected to be turned down, how he expected Mycroft to draw back or call him foolish.
I would be glad to, Greg, Mycroft penned down. Thank you.
Mycroft tore through school at a speed that amazed his handlers, dismayed his teachers, and made his classmates downright cross with him. The only people who weren’t surprised in the least were his family.
“We’re proud of you,” his mother said.
“Be smart,” his father advised, hawkish eyes pinning him like a butterfly to a board.
“Brother,” Sherlock said with a toothy smile. “Clever.”
And he was.
Many different divisions wanted him. It wasn’t legal to recruit him so young, he knew. It wasn’t moral in the least (not that he or his family cared-a career was a career and if it didn’t rot his brain it was a good career), but it was what he wanted. He wanted something exciting that also gave him a fairly solid chance at a future of being a spider in the middle of a massive web.
Mycroft liked that analogy more than he was truly willing to admit.
“About the boy,” his current handler told him when he turned sixteen and began to prepare to leave school to go oversees. “It has been decided that you must terminate your contact with him.”
The words rang through his head like the tolling of a death bell.
It has been decided that you must terminate your contact with him.
He wasn’t positive they could have picked a worse way to go about informing him of that. Greg wasn’t a boy anymore. He was on the cusp of being a man. He was in the midst of his A-levels, he was working on finding a Uni (This one has a course on Pathology, Mycroft, how brilliant does that sound?) and he was going to London. He was going to London because Mycroft had promised him London-had promised they would meet in London. He had set no dates, no times, no years-but he had more than implied that once Greg had gone away to uni there was more than a chance of them meeting.
…terminate your contact with him.
If he did that, there would be no meeting him. There wouldn’t be a flying chance of hell in him ever getting near Greg. He wouldn’t be allowed to send a letter, call, hell, he wouldn’t even be able to send a carrier pigeon to the boy, let alone meet with him.
But Mycroft had been working to this end for years. Not the end of his relationship with Greg (relationship, his mind murmured, is that what this is?), but his plan to be a spy. To gather information and use it to protect queen and country. To serve the government and do great things for his father to be proud about.
I wanted Greg to be proud of me too, he admitted silently to himself.
“I understand,” he said out loud. “I’ll do that immediately.”
He didn’t just place the letters all willy nilly over the desk anymore. He didn’t even have the same desk-he had a private study in the prefects hall and in the corner of it he had a filing system specifically for all of his correspondence with Gregory Lestrade. Everything from when the boy was twelve up until now, six years later, all of his letters chronologically ordered in a box with a lock on the outside of it.
He didn’t think he could get rid of it, but he knew they wouldn’t let him keep it, either.
He allowed himself to slide the key into the small lock and twist it open so that he could look upon the dozens and dozens of letters he had acquired from the other boy.
Mycroft, they all began with.
Each had a different topic but at the beginning of each letter Greg had written in his confident hand a spiky M and the smaller letters of the rest of Mycroft’s name as though it was the most important thing in the world to him.
For all Mycroft new, he was, but then, for all he knew he wasn’t.
He pulled out the very first letter he had ever received and looked over the juvenile handwriting that had so naively spelled out his address so many years ago and sucked in a painful breath.
It was time to leave his childhood behind.
With the letter sent off, he locked up the box and sent it to his parents. Put it away, he wrote his father. I don’t need it anymore. For all he knew his father had no idea what was in it-he certainly never asked. And he never asked about Greg, either. Although after Mycroft left school and began traveling he did mention him a few times.
“Gregory was by for dinner,” he said over a secure telephone line once, some months after Mycroft had begun his travels. “He asked about you-haven’t you been in contact?”
“I’m sorry,” Mycroft replied, “I’m afraid you’re breaking up.”
He had to leave that part of his life behind.
But every time he visited somewhere new he fancied he could hear Greg’s voice in his head (not that he knew what that sounded like).
“Look at that!” he would say as he pointed at something spectacular, “Have you ever seen anything like it?”
He rather thought Greg would enjoy the pyramids, but then he thought of London and his heart fell. The city was where Greg would be-not Egypt.
But as the years went by he wanted to return to his homeland. There was only so much travel a man could do before he craved a steady and cushy desk job. He felt he had earned it, besides, so he returned to England. To London.
To Greg, his heart whispered.
Only to find out that in his absence his brother had gone off the deep end.
He found this out on the plane over the ocean, of course. It didn’t matter which ocean-they all looked the same. But as he flipped through the papers on his brother he saw words and phrases like decrepit flat on Montague Street, drugs, dropped out of Uni, and National Security Threat that jumped out at him off the page.
“What in the world,” he said with a sigh at the new, and young, personal assistant he had seemed to acquire, “has he gotten himself into?”
“At the moment, sir?” she replied, thumbing at her mobile with a devotion that he supposed any man would wish to have from a wife. “He’s got himself arrested, from what I understand.”
Mycroft blinked tiredly. “He’s what?”
That, of course, was how he met Gregory A. Lestrade.
He had planned on tracking the man down, of course. How could he resist? No more handlers, no more warnings of personal relations being insecure, he could do what he wanted with who he wanted and if he wanted to track down a childhood friend then he was bloody well going to do it.
He didn’t expect that Greg had been the one to arrest Sherlock.
Of course, that wasn’t actually on the records (He must find out how his p.a. found out these things, she was turning out to be an excellent resource already) since Greg had let his brother go almost immediately after taking him into custody. But Greg was a detective. A detective inspector, no less. He had hair that was going silver and a deep voice with a bit of the dialect from their old village still seeping into it and bright eyes that tried to catch everything they could. He had excellent senses, how else had he noticed Mycroft skulking around the corner?
But he couldn’t introduce himself.
He couldn’t do it. Mycroft had been away for years-would Greg even recognise him? Why would he? He seemed to have a successful job using the cleverness that Mycroft had always known that he had had. And he was tired. Mycroft couldn’t remember the last time he had slept.
He resolved to find his new flat, settle into his new job, leisurely take the time to look up Greg’s records and then approach the man at a later date.
He was sure that it wouldn’t take long to banish any bad blood that may have been between them thanks to his precipitous letter.
Only it didn’t go like that at all.
He didn’t go to Uni, Mycroft realised with dismay. In fact, Greg didn’t finish school at all. Everything seemed to go immediately downhill after Mycroft left. Greg’s life fell apart and then he dropped off the grid. He left, perhaps he was looking for Mycroft, perhaps he was hiding, perhaps, perhaps, perhaps-not all the perhaps’ in the world would tell Mycroft what had happened when he had left to travel the world. The only person who could tell him that was Greg, and he had moved on with his life.
So he settled into his job, harassed Sherlock, and pretended Gregory A. Lestrade didn’t exist at all.
After all, he thought to himself, he’s done perfectly fine without me so far.
Greg’s face showed on his computer screen as he inspected the CCTV for traffic violations (or that was what he told himself). He zoomed in until the hawkish tilt of the detective inspector’s face took up half the screen and he had to edit the picture in order to see him through the fuzz. He was focus on something off to the side out of the camera’s sight and Mycroft thought for a moment about saving the photo and secreting it somewhere in his computer’s harddrive. Gregory Lestrade was a handsome man, after all (and my friend he thought deep inside).
“Sir?” his personal assistant knocked on the door frame. “Your two o’clock meeting?”
Mycroft hit delete. The picture went away and after a few more taps of his keyboard a blank screen came up and the photo was gone forever.
“Ah!” he greeted, turning to greet the man who entered the doorway. “How nice to see you, Mr. Murphy.”
There was no need to dwell on the past. Greg probably didn’t even remember him anyway.
Book Three--Lestrade
Book Two-Mycroft
Mycroft Holmes was absolutely not taken aback by the letter that arrived for him at school addressed in juvenile and sloppy handwriting. Surprised, yes-but not taken aback.
The only communiqués he usually received were letters from mummy meticulously written in codes such as How are your studies? (Have you made any progress on that issue of national security we couriered to you?) Are you having any troubles with your classmates? (The mole has been neutralized, please report if any others are discovered) and How is your dear Maths Professor Mr. Daniels? Are his classes enjoyable? (Thank you for reporting his suspicious activities, they have been curtailed and he has been sufficiently threatened into teaching you the proper things you need).
His father didn’t trust the phone or the post and usually showed up at odd times in person-usually at the perfect moment to intimidate Mycroft’s teachers and passive aggressively frighten his classmates. Sometimes his younger brother Sherlock tagged along with him. He was a precocious child-even at three years old (and this was compared to how advanced Mycroft had been at his age) and appeared to evaluate every move their father made on his visits to Mycroft's school.
If his parents needed to send him something of import (such as state secrets or care packages from home) they sent a trusted courier. One of Mycroft's favorite exercises was to determine how many weapons these people carried and what their previous job had been (the most amusing of the lot had been the one who had posed as a mime to gain access to private households and collect sensitive information for the government).
So when he found a letter in his cubby addressed to him in handwriting that suggested the writer had never had to spell the name Mycroft in his entire life (the y and the c were much too straight for someone with the experience writing them next to each other to have written) he stood a moment to glean what he could from the outside of the envelope alone.
He half-expected grimy fingerprints to line the cheap paper, but other than where the boy had accidentally transferred some glue from the back of the stamp to the upper right corner of the crisp rectangle with his pointer finger (or perhaps his thumb-fingerprints were not Mycroft's forte) the cheap paper was clean and unbent by anything other than the mail sorter and the postman.
Mycroft's name and address had been written in a careful and blocky handwriting that suggested the writer had never sent a letter through the post before and had been trying very hard to keep his handwriting legible. It also told Mycroft that the boy had quite deliberately foregone using joined-up-writing for some reason or another that Mycroft couldn't deduce without further information (as he tilted the envelope in his hand he mused, not for the first time, that Americans had the oddest words for some things. Cursive, honestly. What if one's handwriting made it spiky and not curved?).
The address itself had been directly copied from another sheet of paper that had been typed-judging by the letters the boy had attempted to copy from the typeset rather than just writing it the way he had been taught.
The boy's own address had been familiar enough that it had been written in a cramped hand in the upper left corner and was nearly indistinct to Mycroft's keen eyes. Nearly, he thought, because he had a particularly discerning eye when it came to handwriting. How else had he managed to read and break the code Professor Daniels had been using to pass on information that the silly rich boys Mycroft attended school with had been foolish enough to reveal in the classroom?
The name was the part that he left for last, and he was almost disappointed when he realized that (in a peculiarly adult fashion) the boy had simply penned his first initial and last name.
G. Lestrade, it said.
Well, Master Lestrade, he thought, amused, You've caught my attention.
He kept the letter firmly pinched between his thumb and fingers as he left the commons and retreated to his dormitory. The building was relatively empty and quiet as all of the other boys were taking advantage of the rare sunny day to run about outside like heathens and play games in the mud. Mycroft liked it that way because it meant he could ascend the stairs un-harassed and still in possession of his curious letter.
It was quiet upstairs as well so he sat at the small desk next to his bed to open the letter. With a moue of distaste, he slid his metal ruler under the glued down flap and prised it open. He would never understand the logic behind denying students the right to own a letter opener based on its resemblance to a weapon.
He knew a man who could kill with his thumb, accoutrements almost didn't matter.
The envelope gave way with a snick; Mycroft replaced the ruler in its proper place and returned his attention to the letter.
Hello, My name is Gregory Aiden Lestrade...
The handwriting regained its confidence once the boy had written his name. Gregory, Mycroft thought. Father would find a person with such a proper name.
The question was, what did he find this person for?
What Mycroft loved about his skills (and, presumably what the government coveted) was that he could deduce as many things about a person simply from a snippet of their writing as a lover could from a pillow confession (it was also about 100% more accurate). Normally he discovered the information he was searching for in diaries, notes, and letters to other people.
Mycroft had never had someone simply offer information about themselves to him before. It was unprecedented.
I'm twelve years old and support Arsenal. Do you like football? You didn't have any posters in your room, but you did have some books. I wanted to be surprised when your father pointed one out to me, but what kind of person doesn't like football? Not one I'd like to know, I'm sure.
Mycroft had to sit back heavily and almost let the letter fall to the desk. The boy had been in his room. Not only that, but his father had been aware of it-had, in fact, been in there with the boy. This wasn't just unprecedented. This was the beginning of the apocalypse. This boy, who simply laid out his name, location, age, and the fact that he had been freely allowed in a room with state secrets in it was obviously much more than he seemed.
His father hadn't said a word, of course.
With this new information, Mycroft could analyze the details he had gleaned from the envelope in a new light. His address had been copied in such a stilted fashion because his father had typed it out for the boy and the boy, Gregory, was almost reluctant to use it. He felt obligated, in some sort of way, but not because of Mycroft's father (otherwise there would have been quite a bit more resentment in his handwriting). The envelope had been his own, it was far too cheap to have been something his father provided, and the paper he wrote the letter itself on was as well. Which meant that though his father thought Gregory needed a little prompting, he trusted the boy to write the letter as he had been asked.
His father trusted a boy from down the village.
How...odd.
In fact, not only had Gregory not been manipulated into writing Mycroft, he wished to do so-desperately, judging by his obsessively careful treatment of the envelope and address.
There is more to this boy than it seems, Mycroft thought.
Mycroft hadn't been taken aback by the letter arriving-he had received communiqués from much stranger quarters-but he was beginning to be taken aback by the Gregory's manners and words. He called Mycroft's father loving and cheerfully admitted that he had been quite insistent upon procuring Gregory for Mycroft. How peculiar.
The things that didn't add up were that Mycroft's father had allowed Gregory to contact Mycroft without first informing his son, and that he had encouraged him to do so in the first place. Why in the world would he be interested in a village boy? Oh, Mycroft could explain in many ways way he himself would be interested in Gregory. He had an understated intelligence, wasn't too terribly slow at picking up the undercurrents, and seemed to have a talent for cutting right to the heart of the matter and acting as though he'd done nothing amazing at all.
...he thinks I could be your friend. If you like.
Indeed.
Mycroft shuffled back through the letter one more time and tried to glean as many things as he could from it. He observed how the slant to a certain letter meant that Gregory thought he was boringly normal and that he'd do nothing worthwhile with his life, but how a curve to another meant that he had a self-assuredness that most twelve year-olds did not possess. He had pride, judging by his Ps, but it was counterweighted by the modesty spoken of him in his Ns.
Gregory was a mass of contradictions.
But one thing was clear to Mycroft-if he accepted his friendship, he would have a friend for life.
After a few minutes of deliberation, he pulled out his own sheet of paper and laid pen to it.
Gregory, he began. I was quite surprised to receive your letter as my father had visited just a day ago and he had not mentioned meeting you-I presume he had his reasons, however. I was also surprised to learn that you had been to the manor. My father invited you for dinner, did he? For a proposal, I imagine. Mummy and father are always quite worried about me meeting someone at school, and if it means that they will cease pestering me about it I will happily write to you whenever you wish. I rather like to write letters, but boys our age tend to eschew them for football and other things that involve mud. Not that I don't enjoy football, but I can't imagine why you support Arsenal when everyone knows that...
Mycroft would lay aside the mystery as to why Gregory until later. If his father thought he was appropriate and safe, then Mycroft would count him as that as well. He saw no reason not to from the boy's letter.
I want to say straight off, Gregory had written, that I'm not writing to you because he's paying me, even though my parents think I am.
That didn't tell Mycroft why Gregory had written to him, but he would find out. It wouldn't be that hard, he thought. It wouldn’t be hard at all.
No, Greg wrote some days down the line, his pen digging into the paper in frustration. I hadn’t planned on Uni. Don’t see the point, really. I’ll just be a builder like my da. Could do an NVQ, I suppose, but I’ve got plenty of time to decide. Don’t need Uni to learn how to whack a hammer on a nail. What will you be when you grow up? I know you're clever-it’s brilliant, really, having such a clever friend, but what sort of thing could you do with cleverness?
Mycroft deliberated on his response for quite a while. He couldn’t very well tell Gregory that he had already been recruited by the government as some sort of underage analyst who broke codes and kept a close eye on moles. He certainly couldn’t tell Gregory that he knew more about the boy from his handwriting than from his actual written words, and he definitely wasn’t going to say that the amount of information he had gleaned was actually quite pitiful.
Well, to anyone else it would seem a respectable amount. Brilliant, even, if he went by Gregory’s terminology. But Mycroft knew that he was missing something vital about Gregory’s character. His instincts told him it wasn’t horrific or even dangerous (he also doubted Gregory would have made it past his father if it was) but he was rather curious about what the boy was hiding from him.
Obsessed with footy was an understatement, he found. Whenever Gregory felt himself on unequal footing, at a loss as to where the conversation was going, or avoiding a question, he always fell back on Arsenal.
Personally, Mycroft preferred Man U. But each to their own, he supposed.
He found that Gregory quite successfully distracted him, however, and had to fight himself to get back onto the topic of Gregory attending school. Mycroft thought it a waste of a competent mind to simply go into building. He found it horrific that someone as sharp as Gregory would willingly consign themselves to banging on things all day long and never looked forward to anything else.
The boy should at least give himself options.
No friend of mine, Mycroft wrote back, will limit himself in such a way. You’re perfectly capable of attending University in the future. In fact, I recommend it-I don’t say this to everyone I meet, I hope you realise, but you are definitely clever enough for Uni. I won’t drop the subject, I can promise you that. You will take your O-levels and then you’re A-levels and when the time comes, we’ll find the perfect Uni for you.
Hm, Mycroft thought to himself as he looked down on the sheet of paper masquerading as something innocent. Why in the world am I already thinking years ahead when we’ve only written a few times?
But then he glanced across his desk at the increasing stack of letters from Gregory and felt a smile twitch at the corner of his lips. Well, he though as he placed his pen to paper. It couldn’t hurt.
School is boring, Gregory wrote later. I finish everything ahead of everyone else and then I have nothing to do. I hate it when we have to work on everything together because everyone is so slow. Is it like this for you as well, Mycroft?
That was an excellent question, he thought, tapping his pen to his lips and ignoring the growing pile of letters slowly taking over his desk that he should really put somewhere else. Each envelope had the same careful block print pressed into it in pen, as though the person who addressed them didn’t trust the postman to read his handwriting, but the letters had increasingly relaxed handwriting that mirrored Gregory’s feelings like a pool of water.
It wouldn’t hurt, I suppose, he began to write slowly, to think of other things besides school. You’ve got a library, haven’t you? There must be one in the school at the least. If you finish ahead, read a book-find something to study. The trick of it is to always look like you’re busy with something studious…
To Mycroft’s ongoing surprise, their letters go on and on endlessly. They speak of everything-the flowers in Gregory’s garden, his brothers, Mycroft’s studies and the boys in his dorm, footy, teachers, their futures (I’d like to find myself a place with the government, Mycroft confessed one day. A place in which I have respect but not a lot of publicity), and anything else that came to mind.
Gregory began to grow, he noticed. Oh, he knew that the boy was already older than he was, and clever (not as clever as Mycroft, or even his younger brother Sherlock, of course), but he went from being a quiet mummy’s boy to a young man who wrote Mycroft with a self-assurance that leaked into his penmanship and gave him his own unique slant that spread through every word he wrote.
I’d like to go to London, someday, Gregory confessed.
If you go to Uni you can, Mycroft replied. We can go to London together.
After he had written that letter, licked the envelope, and sent it off, he realised that he had told the truth. He wanted to meet Gregory, he wanted to do brilliant things with the other boy, he wanted to see him become a man, or at least meet him when he was one. He wanted to share in his triumphs and commiserate in his defeats, he wanted to advise him through troubles and nudge him in the write direction whenever he began to steer himself wrong. He wanted to be there for Gregory-always.
I think I’d like it if you’d call me Greg, Gregory wrote in a careful sort of handwriting that Mycroft had not seen since some of his earlier letters over a year previous. No one else calls me that. Your father calls me Gregory and my da and everyone else call me Georgie (which I hate) so I think I’d like you to call me Greg.
For the first time in months Gregory was hesitant and his handwriting showed how he expected to be turned down, how he expected Mycroft to draw back or call him foolish.
I would be glad to, Greg, Mycroft penned down. Thank you.
Mycroft tore through school at a speed that amazed his handlers, dismayed his teachers, and made his classmates downright cross with him. The only people who weren’t surprised in the least were his family.
“We’re proud of you,” his mother said.
“Be smart,” his father advised, hawkish eyes pinning him like a butterfly to a board.
“Brother,” Sherlock said with a toothy smile. “Clever.”
And he was.
Many different divisions wanted him. It wasn’t legal to recruit him so young, he knew. It wasn’t moral in the least (not that he or his family cared-a career was a career and if it didn’t rot his brain it was a good career), but it was what he wanted. He wanted something exciting that also gave him a fairly solid chance at a future of being a spider in the middle of a massive web.
Mycroft liked that analogy more than he was truly willing to admit.
“About the boy,” his current handler told him when he turned sixteen and began to prepare to leave school to go oversees. “It has been decided that you must terminate your contact with him.”
The words rang through his head like the tolling of a death bell.
It has been decided that you must terminate your contact with him.
He wasn’t positive they could have picked a worse way to go about informing him of that. Greg wasn’t a boy anymore. He was on the cusp of being a man. He was in the midst of his A-levels, he was working on finding a Uni (This one has a course on Pathology, Mycroft, how brilliant does that sound?) and he was going to London. He was going to London because Mycroft had promised him London-had promised they would meet in London. He had set no dates, no times, no years-but he had more than implied that once Greg had gone away to uni there was more than a chance of them meeting.
…terminate your contact with him.
If he did that, there would be no meeting him. There wouldn’t be a flying chance of hell in him ever getting near Greg. He wouldn’t be allowed to send a letter, call, hell, he wouldn’t even be able to send a carrier pigeon to the boy, let alone meet with him.
But Mycroft had been working to this end for years. Not the end of his relationship with Greg (relationship, his mind murmured, is that what this is?), but his plan to be a spy. To gather information and use it to protect queen and country. To serve the government and do great things for his father to be proud about.
I wanted Greg to be proud of me too, he admitted silently to himself.
“I understand,” he said out loud. “I’ll do that immediately.”
He didn’t just place the letters all willy nilly over the desk anymore. He didn’t even have the same desk-he had a private study in the prefects hall and in the corner of it he had a filing system specifically for all of his correspondence with Gregory Lestrade. Everything from when the boy was twelve up until now, six years later, all of his letters chronologically ordered in a box with a lock on the outside of it.
He didn’t think he could get rid of it, but he knew they wouldn’t let him keep it, either.
He allowed himself to slide the key into the small lock and twist it open so that he could look upon the dozens and dozens of letters he had acquired from the other boy.
Mycroft, they all began with.
Each had a different topic but at the beginning of each letter Greg had written in his confident hand a spiky M and the smaller letters of the rest of Mycroft’s name as though it was the most important thing in the world to him.
For all Mycroft new, he was, but then, for all he knew he wasn’t.
He pulled out the very first letter he had ever received and looked over the juvenile handwriting that had so naively spelled out his address so many years ago and sucked in a painful breath.
It was time to leave his childhood behind.
With the letter sent off, he locked up the box and sent it to his parents. Put it away, he wrote his father. I don’t need it anymore. For all he knew his father had no idea what was in it-he certainly never asked. And he never asked about Greg, either. Although after Mycroft left school and began traveling he did mention him a few times.
“Gregory was by for dinner,” he said over a secure telephone line once, some months after Mycroft had begun his travels. “He asked about you-haven’t you been in contact?”
“I’m sorry,” Mycroft replied, “I’m afraid you’re breaking up.”
He had to leave that part of his life behind.
But every time he visited somewhere new he fancied he could hear Greg’s voice in his head (not that he knew what that sounded like).
“Look at that!” he would say as he pointed at something spectacular, “Have you ever seen anything like it?”
He rather thought Greg would enjoy the pyramids, but then he thought of London and his heart fell. The city was where Greg would be-not Egypt.
But as the years went by he wanted to return to his homeland. There was only so much travel a man could do before he craved a steady and cushy desk job. He felt he had earned it, besides, so he returned to England. To London.
To Greg, his heart whispered.
Only to find out that in his absence his brother had gone off the deep end.
He found this out on the plane over the ocean, of course. It didn’t matter which ocean-they all looked the same. But as he flipped through the papers on his brother he saw words and phrases like decrepit flat on Montague Street, drugs, dropped out of Uni, and National Security Threat that jumped out at him off the page.
“What in the world,” he said with a sigh at the new, and young, personal assistant he had seemed to acquire, “has he gotten himself into?”
“At the moment, sir?” she replied, thumbing at her mobile with a devotion that he supposed any man would wish to have from a wife. “He’s got himself arrested, from what I understand.”
Mycroft blinked tiredly. “He’s what?”
That, of course, was how he met Gregory A. Lestrade.
He had planned on tracking the man down, of course. How could he resist? No more handlers, no more warnings of personal relations being insecure, he could do what he wanted with who he wanted and if he wanted to track down a childhood friend then he was bloody well going to do it.
He didn’t expect that Greg had been the one to arrest Sherlock.
Of course, that wasn’t actually on the records (He must find out how his p.a. found out these things, she was turning out to be an excellent resource already) since Greg had let his brother go almost immediately after taking him into custody. But Greg was a detective. A detective inspector, no less. He had hair that was going silver and a deep voice with a bit of the dialect from their old village still seeping into it and bright eyes that tried to catch everything they could. He had excellent senses, how else had he noticed Mycroft skulking around the corner?
But he couldn’t introduce himself.
He couldn’t do it. Mycroft had been away for years-would Greg even recognise him? Why would he? He seemed to have a successful job using the cleverness that Mycroft had always known that he had had. And he was tired. Mycroft couldn’t remember the last time he had slept.
He resolved to find his new flat, settle into his new job, leisurely take the time to look up Greg’s records and then approach the man at a later date.
He was sure that it wouldn’t take long to banish any bad blood that may have been between them thanks to his precipitous letter.
Only it didn’t go like that at all.
He didn’t go to Uni, Mycroft realised with dismay. In fact, Greg didn’t finish school at all. Everything seemed to go immediately downhill after Mycroft left. Greg’s life fell apart and then he dropped off the grid. He left, perhaps he was looking for Mycroft, perhaps he was hiding, perhaps, perhaps, perhaps-not all the perhaps’ in the world would tell Mycroft what had happened when he had left to travel the world. The only person who could tell him that was Greg, and he had moved on with his life.
So he settled into his job, harassed Sherlock, and pretended Gregory A. Lestrade didn’t exist at all.
After all, he thought to himself, he’s done perfectly fine without me so far.
Greg’s face showed on his computer screen as he inspected the CCTV for traffic violations (or that was what he told himself). He zoomed in until the hawkish tilt of the detective inspector’s face took up half the screen and he had to edit the picture in order to see him through the fuzz. He was focus on something off to the side out of the camera’s sight and Mycroft thought for a moment about saving the photo and secreting it somewhere in his computer’s harddrive. Gregory Lestrade was a handsome man, after all (and my friend he thought deep inside).
“Sir?” his personal assistant knocked on the door frame. “Your two o’clock meeting?”
Mycroft hit delete. The picture went away and after a few more taps of his keyboard a blank screen came up and the photo was gone forever.
“Ah!” he greeted, turning to greet the man who entered the doorway. “How nice to see you, Mr. Murphy.”
There was no need to dwell on the past. Greg probably didn’t even remember him anyway.
Book Three--Lestrade