Sherlock fic: Tinker, Soldier, Sailor, Holmes
Title: Tinker, Soldier, Sailor, Holmes
Characters: Mycroft, (Sherlock, [Moriarty, John])
Rating PG
Spoilers: The Reichenbach Falls
Notes: ~4,300 words. Fusion of The Reichenbach Falls with Eternal Law, but you certainly don't need the latter to see what's going on. Taking all that talk of angels and falling literally.
All lives end. All hearts are broken. --A Scandal in Belgravia
I have found a love so brilliant that it banishes all shadows, except that one, tiny unbanishable shadow that something so wonderful must one day end. --Eternal Law
And then, Sherlock falls.
Sherlock falls, and Mycroft expects-what? Recriminations, a call on the line to which nobody has the number (nobody: not the PM; not his “old friend”, who is an older friend than she realises; not even Anthea), or a devastating earthquake like a rip in the weave of the Earth, or possibly the Apocalypse itself. Mycroft expects all of these in turn, has dreaded them, but none of it comes to pass.
Mr. Mountjoy is silent.
It is as though nothing has happened at all.
~
Technically, and by design, Mycroft is incapable of doubt. But the sense of loss that sweeps through him, like a flash flood that washes away tree and rock alike as it drowns the valley, is so comprehensive that he experiences it as a momentary insanity. He confuses the absence that he feels with the disappearance of the Immanent, and for that moment it is as though he has become not that scoured and emptied valley, but a mere simulacrum of the valley, a shell with vague contours fashioned of Styrofoam and model paint, gone brittle with age.
He stops dead in the street, halfway to the point of impact, and for the first time in a thousand, nine hundred and sixty five years must double over and retch on the pavement.
~
Once, before, he had felt a loss like this, and that wound haunts him still. Then, it had been less personal-a shared diminution-and he, as a member of that host, far less vulnerable.
Mycroft cannot imagine recovering from such grief now.
Yet the days dawn, and the city lives, and the dutifulness of the good son means that he, too, goes on.
~
When Sherlock had been new in the world, Mycroft had already been old. Of course, this difference was predicated on an illusion: they were the same, he and his brother. It was only that Sherlock had had less experience, only that Mycroft had been waiting so many years for someone to join him.
He remembers how it had been for Sherlock, then. How the world had glistened and shone, endlessly stimulating, ceaselessly effervescent. How it had been new, and every breath of air, every reflection of light in a drop of dew, and most of all every unpredictable, irrational, maddening human life had been a source of fresh and intense fascination. Of wonder. Through Sherlock, Mycroft had seen it all again as he had in his own initial years of discovery.
But the centuries accrue, and this isn’t a tour of duty, it’s deep cover; and Mycroft can only empathise too well with the disenchantment that came once that childlike phase had passed.
~
This is the thing with time. It is very, very long. Even human time, time measured by human standards, can seem an eternity, while human history plods through day after tedious day, making no evident progress. Sometimes, in less than generous moods, one finds oneself wishing they would bloody get on with it, exercise that vaunted free will of theirs, decide one way or the other, little matter which.
It isn’t a fair thought, and it isn’t right to think it. Nevertheless…eventually, the unpredictable becomes repetitive, the exotic, banal. It is an inevitable side effect of this passage through duration, coupled with a non-human’s longevity.
“What’s the point?” Sherlock would ask again and again as he paced in rapid-fire agitation across Portland stone. “We solve their little puzzles and hold their idiot hands, defend their city and protect their institutions.”
Sherlock’s hands described his frustration through the air, like wheels tumbling, like dervishes in the rarefied. “We advise, we guide, every day we help them in a hundred ways. Small, large, in between. Why? What difference does it make?”
“You know why,” Mycroft would respond patiently. “You came here knowing why.”
“They don’t get any better! If anything they doubt more than they did before.”
The slate and cast iron roofs of Westminster shelter those below from this audacity. Even Members of Parliament feel uneasy when the first rebellion echoes over their tender heads.
“I think Mr. Mountjoy likes them to doubt. After all, it’s what makes them human, their niche. Every creature has its function and its place. Ours is to possess certainty, theirs is not. What would be the point if we were all the same?”
And Sherlock would scratch at his scalp in frustration, as though he might burst out of the dome of his skull and take flight, into the sky.
~
London from above in the 21st century appears to be one city, and functionally, it is-a village-consuming metropolis, part of and apart from the nation that surrounds it, a cosmopolitan conurbation hugging the oxbows of a tidal river. Its most visible inhabitants are the office worker in her herringbone and the tourist in his trainers, but it is full of every imaginable type of life, like a mix and match book of race, creed, personality, passion.
Mycroft remembers them all. Not each individual; even he, thinking machine that he is, cannot hold those teeming millions in his mind at once. But he remembers the confident Roman trader, the invading Viking heathen, the Anglo-Saxon defender taking shelter within ancient walls. A thousand years came and went, years of slow building and setbacks, foundations and patience. Solitary years.
Then after the long wait came the second city, and the second sometime cathedral. He remembers Norman monks, Elizabethan merchants; he remembers the coffee house men, the industrialists, the imperialists. He remembers the war-ravaged, remembers the exuberant celebrants who came between the wars with bacchanalian rites to cleanse the hardships of battle. These years, in acute contrast, years of activity, of momentum, of escalation. The accelerating cycle of history became two curves that spiralled more and more tightly at each turn, inexorable, drawn as though by gravity.
As time arced around space, so more and more tightly wound the metropolis, paired cities reaching toward one another even as they expanded ever outwards. As centuries accreted, so two brothers enfolded and invaded one another until the old distance was lost: Peter and Paul, the City and Westminster, Whitehall and St. Bart’s.
~
And then: a plummet, wings folded against lift. The hard crack of bone and cement. Blood.
Mycroft, too far away, for once, to prevent the fall.
~
There is a rumour that, in York, they’ve been sent a clock, ticking down to Doomsday. It is the clock of Armageddon, a clock of annihilation, a reminder and a warning. It sat in the Kremlin once, and went to sleep when humanity pulled back from the brink, but now it sits on a mantelpiece in a house of angels in the shadow of their Minster.
The rumour goes that it’s awake, is running again as a caution on love, an admonition against falling.
Inside Mycroft’s chest, there is a ticking thing that wasn’t meant to count. It squeezes beat after beat into the hollow air, pumping what feels like his very being through the sucking wound. In that adrift place between metaphor and reality, a heart of ice constricts around the jagged void, and each pulse is an agony.
~
He wonders what it feels like…to fall, to die, to be human, to love as a human.
Mycroft loves three things; his brother, London, and Mr. Mountjoy. Of the three, two have been taken, placed beyond his reach. Amid the ruins of his love, he finds he can derive little comfort from the third.
~
He was never made to be alone.
~
Two thousand years may be a blink of an eye in a timeline of billions, but it’s different here, where the passage of time has real meaning. It’s a world in which an eternity is not a miracle but a curse; it’s a world that thrives on change; a world in which one must grow, or else decay. In this world, immutability is not steadfastness. It is rigidity. It’s stagnation.
Mycroft is homesick. Mycroft craves the Presence. Mycroft begins to question the reality of himself. Deprived of external proofs, Mycroft forms two contradictory hypotheses: that he is an ordinary, but delusional man; that he is a figment of the imagination of the City. (There exists a third and unbearable hypothesis, posited by his sound mind, that he has been forsaken, burned, left behind.)
After hours, when it is quiet, when all the pilgrims and the City boys have gone home, he perches on the rim of the dome of St. Paul’s, pulling feathers he cannot recognise from wings in which he might not believe. A gust of wind curls over the sphere behind him, and he allows it to pluck the feather from his fingers, watches it dance away, silhouetted by the fulvous, rubescent clouds. It is dove-white with an inner glow against the lurid horizon.
In his mind’s eye, he sees Sherlock poised on the guard rail, a wash of grey from tip to tip, a prism without colour, a chandelier, a million surfaces now ash, now ebony-sometimes, the palest blue-as he pivoted on his scuffed oxfords to survey the settlement below, the human habitation they’d been sent to protect.
Wings fully outspread for stability, he was, even in his ambiguity and ambivalence, Glory. Every sharp line of him, everything that lay in shadow, every illuminated pale expanse of skin; the dark curls as though he’d escaped a Rubens, the proud tilt of his spine that said that everything he saw was, in a sense, his (pride being the sin he had always indulged); all of it spoke of his Creator, as though he was at once encomium and emulation. And he wore it all as casually as he wore his coat.
It took Mycroft’s breath away.
Then, as in so many other instances, and with a frisson of blasphemy, he had quietly thanked not Mr. Mountjoy, but Edward the Confessor for requiring a separate and permanent court upriver, so close one could simply reach out across the rooftops and touch.
~
Why, then, was it Sherlock who had first begun to falter?
Sherlock the cherished; Sherlock, who might have sung ‘holy, holy, holy’, but who had been sent to Mycroft instead, like a gift or a blessing; Sherlock, whose beauty was the very flame of being, which was never still, which set light to everything it touched, and which was irresistible to all creatures, mortal and celestial.
For Mycroft, it was a need and an instinct, born of his very nature. He had no more choice in the matter than did a millwheel in the matter of whether or not to revolve under the physical compulsion of a river. Although he had made more than one career out of performing complex calculations and formulating sophisticated analyses on behalf of the British Government since long before it had been the British (English, Britannic) Government, his heart was simple. His love was absolute. He found it an inescapable compulsion.
He was, had always, would always be drawn to Sherlock-as an extension of Mr. Mountjoy. As a stray beam from the sun behind clouds. And his desire for Mr. Mountjoy lies somewhere between his rather human need for breath and the very inhuman meaning at the centre of what he is.
But Sherlock had always been different.
~
After all, it was one of his rank who had initiated the line of inquiry that launched the rebellion in the first place.
One just like Sherlock who had asked the first question.
Mycroft could all too easily picture Sherlock accruing the evidence, assembling the deductions, casting the most damning objections.
~
What this means is that the game they’d played with Sherlock could only ever have been seduction.
Fire needs so many things. It needs oxygen. It needs heat. It needs something to burn. Sherlock required the constant din of battle; he relentlessly sought the next chase, the next skirmish, the next triumphant victory. It was as though even on earth he was ceaselessly declaiming, his actions shouts, and he couldn’t stop because he needed to hear it, needed to hear the alleluia. And all the other voices were too distant, or too soft. Mycroft’s voice was too soft. His form of the paean, too dull and colourless to take the edge off Sherlock’s hunger.
No, it isn’t Mycroft, and it wasn’t ever going to be Mycroft. Mycroft was dazzled minder, besotted nanny. Mycroft did half of Sherlock’s work for him, when Sherlock couldn’t be bothered to actually help, except in that truculent, contrary way he had decided was good enough if he said it was, even if it wasn’t what Mountjoy had directed. (Solving murders. Getting involved with the already dead, when by then it wasn’t up to him anymore what happened to them. To think that Mycroft had been relieved, back in 1875-or was it 73?-when Sherlock had started detecting rather than advising, or, more often, just running around blatantly not doing what he’d been sent to do at all. It isn’t Mycroft’s contention that stopping those violent criminals isn’t a form of grace, it is simply that there is so much more than that to be done. An entire, growing city to safeguard.)
~
That it had to be him, though-always him, always one of the original cadre-, and using them, their flock! It is ineluctible and unjust and maddening.
Moriarty.
Mycroft shivers, rustling restively in the dying light as he summons to his mind the most recent earthly form of the one who calls himself Jim Moriarty. That image will never cease to be unnerving. Somehow, it is always the same form, even when it isn’t, the same fevered body, the face that can morph from absolute, almost catatonic indifference to insane and uncontrolled rictus in the blink of an eye. The energy that seems untethered from the vessel, as though the coupling didn’t quite take. Mycroft doesn’t know why this last characteristic, in particular, should bother him so. He can’t exactly blame it on a discomfort with the incorporeal. It’s the dissonance, perhaps. The grating sensation of metals vibrating mercilessly against one another. Demonic-all too apt.
He hates to think what it must be like, inside Moriarty’s head.
It’s possible there isn’t really anything left inside Moriarty’s head at all, only hell and rage and a singular purpose, bring it all down, topple the blocks, turn everyone, convince them all, we were right and He was wrong, tempt them all over the edge, plunge all of creation into the pit. He makes it look a game, but at the end of it the pieces shatter and the board burns and no one wins. At the end of it, it’s just blood, on the walls and in the street, and stone that weeps, and Mr. Mountjoy will be upset, but it’s Moriarty’s lot who will have lost, Moriarty’s lot and all of humanity. Every soul Mycroft has worked so hard for so many centuries to protect.
~
Why is Sherlock susceptible to Moriarty’s manipulation? Mycroft’s thoughts circle again and again to the same question, the one he has already failed to answer.
If it was boredom, if Sherlock had hoped to go home, there had to have been another way. Mycroft, too, has wanted- Mycroft, too, has waited, and toiled, in vain.
~
There’s blood on the pavement, commingled with cold and metal-tanged rain, ferrous puddle like a black reflecting pool. By the time Mycroft composes himself to emerge from the lee of the old brick hospital, the human drama has dissipated: the crowd, the gurney, the sympathetic bystander gently helping the grieving friend away. On the empty stone that remains, a tepid cocktail of serum and sugars and cellular material, mimicry of human life, stains the bones of Mycroft’s London.
~
The centuries suddenly stretch away from him in both directions. Perspective shifts like the walls of a funhouse tunnel. An underground station, roiling with water, with explosions. With panic. Mycroft moves through the Flood and the rubble like he’s drowning in wet earth. Mud.
And then, and then: and-then
the Fall.
A swan dive into the Thames. Mycroft surfaces.
Sherlock’s body in the colourless morgue is an abandoned vessel, containing nothing. Mycroft sends the girl away and stands regarding this cooling shell with grim, determined indifference. He does not retch again.
The mortal flesh keeps silence. Mycroft doesn’t need to see the broken body to know that Sherlock is gone; he felt the departure as surely as he feels the smooth coldness of the steel surface hard beneath his palms. The body isn’t Sherlock, but Mycroft has grown accustomed to its scent, alive, its contours, its hue, the amount of physical space it occupies.
And he has never…other assets are assigned, recalled, deployed again. New body, new name, new face, new identity. What is it like to return? Is it damnation, or is it joy? Mycroft doesn’t know how that cycle feels because he has inhabited only one terrestrial form since the beginning. He has only ever worked with his sole equal and one peer (the closest thing he could have to a friend). He has only ever been anchored to one city, one place on all the earth. His City. Theirs.
He has almost forgotten what it is like to be himself and not to be this body. It is a familiar and comfortable home for a spirit that no longer knows how to exist untethered.
~
Mycroft doesn’t need to see his brother’s body on the slab to know that he is once again alone, but seeing it like this, he’s angry.
Angry at Sherlock for taking the risk. Angry at Sherlock for leaving him. Angry that he should listen to Moriarty’s profane seditions, his obscene impieties. Mycroft didn’t need CCTV to bear witness. The words he didn’t hear echo in his head.
But you’re boring. You’re on the side of the angels.
~
But I’m not my brother, remember? I am you.
~
Just once, unobserved, Mycroft allows his composure and self-restraint to slip. Power surges through the room; circuits overload. Lights blow out around the windowless crypt, plunging it into darkness, a darkness in which a suited, winged figure shines too brightly to be seen, raging at the blind unjustness.
It changes nothing. Somewhere above him, there is yet more blood (they’re not human, they shouldn’t be able to bleed, but there is the evidence, the tithe in ichor), more brain and bone splattered across the building. The difference is Moriarty knew exactly the terrifying place he was going when he swallowed his gun, knows very well he’ll be sent back as he always has, to do his master’s wicked work. It’s a meaningless gesture. A taunt. A dare.
I’ll do it if you’ll do it.
But Mycroft’s little brother couldn’t deduce his sentence. Mountjoy works in mysterious ways.
“Sherlock,” Mycroft entreats the emptiness. “Where have you gone?”
His own voice sounds tenuous and frail. The vowels and consonants fail to carry, smothered by cold storage units and seamless epoxy flooring.
~
Angels fall and they could land anywhere. Mr. Mountjoy’s judgment is famously capricious. The wholesale banishment, that first irreparable fracturing of their family, had been a shock to all.
Generally, though, dying on the job is seen as a failure.
Sherlock might belong to Moriarty’s kind now. He might be mortal, or dead. He might be basking in the Divine Presence, sitting at His feet like a favourite pet called in out of the cold.
For precisely half a beat of his too-human heart, Mycroft hates him.
~
That there is no return, Mycroft suspects. But whether there has ever been a choice, he doesn’t know.
For where was Mercy when the damned were cast into perdition? When their eldest brother tried to crawl to Eden, belly scraping shards and gravel? When that place into which they plummeted was made at all?
They are Mycroft’s brothers, too.
Even Moriarty.
But don't be scared. Falling's just like flying except there's a more permanent destination.
And Sherlock? …Prepared to do anything. Prepared to burn….You want me to shake hands with you in hell, I shall not disappoint you.
It is little wonder Moriarty reads as a lunatic, that they all do.
~
Up on the roof again, his own eternal condemnation. The alabaster cathedral looms behind him, Westminster amber in the distance. He sees the scene so clearly, though it has all been cleared away as perfectly as though it were never there at all.
It is as though their moving shadows have been burned into the air: the way they danced around each other with eyes and words, re-enacting a battle none of them can let go, deluding themselves it is a game.
And Moriarty had only to reveal the pieces, had only to make his move, check and mate. And then the world would topple, Mycroft’s world, headfirst with the dark-haired figure who cared, for the first time, and was undone.
Because Sherlock had never become involved before. Centuries had gone by in aloof watchfulness, with kindness and compassion yes, but disinterested compassion, theoretical kindness. Because Sherlock, who had loved with his entire being, indeed who had thrown himself whole into everything he ever decided to do, had never been able to bring himself to understand humanity before, to see that he was like them, made in the same image.
Then, one day, there had been a human being in trouble.
One man who had needed Sherlock. A man who had loved Sherlock, in his human way.
John Watson had taught Sherlock to care, and he had taught Sherlock about being human, and that is the sort of weakness the other side will prey on, when you let it become personal.
When you let yourself want something you were not meant to have.
~
Mycroft remembers, indelibly, the first time he had touched John Watson. The soldier’s hand, the doctor’s hand, in both of his. The soul he had cradled, too, for just one moment, inspecting it for the hidden tremor, the weariness and the courage and the fierce goodness. And the earthy, human joy in life, no less bright for its brevity.
~
He had seen, that time, how the need ran like a vein of ore through the man, and he had known that a matching seam divided Sherlock, recognised it because it was the seam that held Mycroft together.
He has seen, many times since that first, heady reconnaissance, how Sherlock, drawn by the same impulse, would deliberately touch John. A casual brush of the fingers, a calculated inclination of the body. A simultaneous move to possess and protect.
~
When you care about something, you can be threatened. And when you can be threatened, you can be turned. Love is a vicious motivator.
This is the oldest problem, to which Mycroft has no answer.
Once again, finally, the scene: Moriarty and Sherlock on the hospital roof. Mountjoy’s houses in the backdrop. They are on their own up there, suspended between earth and heaven, all of creation unable to reach them. John and Mycroft each trapped in helpless isolation in the endgame below.
Then, for a breath held over a heartbeat, over the space between two rooftops, close enough to touch, there is only Sherlock hanging alone on the precipice.
~
In the present, Mycroft leans over empty space, gazes down at the fall and sees nothing. The City has swallowed Sherlock.
London has eaten one of her own guardians, and the pavement has sealed over the wound.
~
“We ought to show them the truth.”
“We can’t do that. They must decide for themselves.” Mycroft balances his weight on the handle of his umbrella. Once, it might have been the hilt of a sword.
“Isn’t transparency desirable these days? How can they decide for themselves if they haven’t got all the data?”
Vexed-frightened-exhalation, and a moment’s pause to gather himself, to stop his voice going timorous. He forces it instead to be the measured instrument of reason. “This is what the rebels said. This is how Heaven was ripped asunder. Would you have the same fate befall the Earth? And expedite the end of all things?”
Sherlock makes a face. Wrinkles his nose. “It wouldn’t come to that. Would it? They’re not as idiotic as they seem. Are they?”
Mycroft sees he can offer no convincing arguments, and none of the sought-after reassurances, so he says nothing. What would you do, he wonders, if it turned out they are?
But Sherlock posits his own resolutions (when necessary, creates his own truth, Mycroft thinks with the thrill of sacrilege).
“I mean, John isn’t.”
~
And then…Sherlock falls.
It’s faith (in Mr. Mountjoy, in humankind, in himself) that draws him in the end, coat flapping like a parachute he refuses to open. More tableau of human commitment than reflection of that original, struggling plummet. Call it love, call it caring. Or perhaps compassion, or irresponsibility.
It is a drop of salt water in the solution of Mycroft’s heart. All of the questions, all the uncertainties, the ambiguities crystallise into one sharp loss.
Mycroft regards the indifferent street, and then he draws away and turns his considerable attention to the sky.
“Now, what?” he asks.
It is the firmament, but it might as well be mute and inanimate stone, for all it has anything to say in reply.
~
And then-
Characters: Mycroft, (Sherlock, [Moriarty, John])
Rating PG
Spoilers: The Reichenbach Falls
Notes: ~4,300 words. Fusion of The Reichenbach Falls with Eternal Law, but you certainly don't need the latter to see what's going on. Taking all that talk of angels and falling literally.
All lives end. All hearts are broken. --A Scandal in Belgravia
I have found a love so brilliant that it banishes all shadows, except that one, tiny unbanishable shadow that something so wonderful must one day end. --Eternal Law
And then, Sherlock falls.
Sherlock falls, and Mycroft expects-what? Recriminations, a call on the line to which nobody has the number (nobody: not the PM; not his “old friend”, who is an older friend than she realises; not even Anthea), or a devastating earthquake like a rip in the weave of the Earth, or possibly the Apocalypse itself. Mycroft expects all of these in turn, has dreaded them, but none of it comes to pass.
Mr. Mountjoy is silent.
It is as though nothing has happened at all.
~
Technically, and by design, Mycroft is incapable of doubt. But the sense of loss that sweeps through him, like a flash flood that washes away tree and rock alike as it drowns the valley, is so comprehensive that he experiences it as a momentary insanity. He confuses the absence that he feels with the disappearance of the Immanent, and for that moment it is as though he has become not that scoured and emptied valley, but a mere simulacrum of the valley, a shell with vague contours fashioned of Styrofoam and model paint, gone brittle with age.
He stops dead in the street, halfway to the point of impact, and for the first time in a thousand, nine hundred and sixty five years must double over and retch on the pavement.
~
Once, before, he had felt a loss like this, and that wound haunts him still. Then, it had been less personal-a shared diminution-and he, as a member of that host, far less vulnerable.
Mycroft cannot imagine recovering from such grief now.
Yet the days dawn, and the city lives, and the dutifulness of the good son means that he, too, goes on.
~
When Sherlock had been new in the world, Mycroft had already been old. Of course, this difference was predicated on an illusion: they were the same, he and his brother. It was only that Sherlock had had less experience, only that Mycroft had been waiting so many years for someone to join him.
He remembers how it had been for Sherlock, then. How the world had glistened and shone, endlessly stimulating, ceaselessly effervescent. How it had been new, and every breath of air, every reflection of light in a drop of dew, and most of all every unpredictable, irrational, maddening human life had been a source of fresh and intense fascination. Of wonder. Through Sherlock, Mycroft had seen it all again as he had in his own initial years of discovery.
But the centuries accrue, and this isn’t a tour of duty, it’s deep cover; and Mycroft can only empathise too well with the disenchantment that came once that childlike phase had passed.
~
This is the thing with time. It is very, very long. Even human time, time measured by human standards, can seem an eternity, while human history plods through day after tedious day, making no evident progress. Sometimes, in less than generous moods, one finds oneself wishing they would bloody get on with it, exercise that vaunted free will of theirs, decide one way or the other, little matter which.
It isn’t a fair thought, and it isn’t right to think it. Nevertheless…eventually, the unpredictable becomes repetitive, the exotic, banal. It is an inevitable side effect of this passage through duration, coupled with a non-human’s longevity.
“What’s the point?” Sherlock would ask again and again as he paced in rapid-fire agitation across Portland stone. “We solve their little puzzles and hold their idiot hands, defend their city and protect their institutions.”
Sherlock’s hands described his frustration through the air, like wheels tumbling, like dervishes in the rarefied. “We advise, we guide, every day we help them in a hundred ways. Small, large, in between. Why? What difference does it make?”
“You know why,” Mycroft would respond patiently. “You came here knowing why.”
“They don’t get any better! If anything they doubt more than they did before.”
The slate and cast iron roofs of Westminster shelter those below from this audacity. Even Members of Parliament feel uneasy when the first rebellion echoes over their tender heads.
“I think Mr. Mountjoy likes them to doubt. After all, it’s what makes them human, their niche. Every creature has its function and its place. Ours is to possess certainty, theirs is not. What would be the point if we were all the same?”
And Sherlock would scratch at his scalp in frustration, as though he might burst out of the dome of his skull and take flight, into the sky.
~
London from above in the 21st century appears to be one city, and functionally, it is-a village-consuming metropolis, part of and apart from the nation that surrounds it, a cosmopolitan conurbation hugging the oxbows of a tidal river. Its most visible inhabitants are the office worker in her herringbone and the tourist in his trainers, but it is full of every imaginable type of life, like a mix and match book of race, creed, personality, passion.
Mycroft remembers them all. Not each individual; even he, thinking machine that he is, cannot hold those teeming millions in his mind at once. But he remembers the confident Roman trader, the invading Viking heathen, the Anglo-Saxon defender taking shelter within ancient walls. A thousand years came and went, years of slow building and setbacks, foundations and patience. Solitary years.
Then after the long wait came the second city, and the second sometime cathedral. He remembers Norman monks, Elizabethan merchants; he remembers the coffee house men, the industrialists, the imperialists. He remembers the war-ravaged, remembers the exuberant celebrants who came between the wars with bacchanalian rites to cleanse the hardships of battle. These years, in acute contrast, years of activity, of momentum, of escalation. The accelerating cycle of history became two curves that spiralled more and more tightly at each turn, inexorable, drawn as though by gravity.
As time arced around space, so more and more tightly wound the metropolis, paired cities reaching toward one another even as they expanded ever outwards. As centuries accreted, so two brothers enfolded and invaded one another until the old distance was lost: Peter and Paul, the City and Westminster, Whitehall and St. Bart’s.
~
And then: a plummet, wings folded against lift. The hard crack of bone and cement. Blood.
Mycroft, too far away, for once, to prevent the fall.
~
There is a rumour that, in York, they’ve been sent a clock, ticking down to Doomsday. It is the clock of Armageddon, a clock of annihilation, a reminder and a warning. It sat in the Kremlin once, and went to sleep when humanity pulled back from the brink, but now it sits on a mantelpiece in a house of angels in the shadow of their Minster.
The rumour goes that it’s awake, is running again as a caution on love, an admonition against falling.
Inside Mycroft’s chest, there is a ticking thing that wasn’t meant to count. It squeezes beat after beat into the hollow air, pumping what feels like his very being through the sucking wound. In that adrift place between metaphor and reality, a heart of ice constricts around the jagged void, and each pulse is an agony.
~
He wonders what it feels like…to fall, to die, to be human, to love as a human.
Mycroft loves three things; his brother, London, and Mr. Mountjoy. Of the three, two have been taken, placed beyond his reach. Amid the ruins of his love, he finds he can derive little comfort from the third.
~
He was never made to be alone.
~
Two thousand years may be a blink of an eye in a timeline of billions, but it’s different here, where the passage of time has real meaning. It’s a world in which an eternity is not a miracle but a curse; it’s a world that thrives on change; a world in which one must grow, or else decay. In this world, immutability is not steadfastness. It is rigidity. It’s stagnation.
Mycroft is homesick. Mycroft craves the Presence. Mycroft begins to question the reality of himself. Deprived of external proofs, Mycroft forms two contradictory hypotheses: that he is an ordinary, but delusional man; that he is a figment of the imagination of the City. (There exists a third and unbearable hypothesis, posited by his sound mind, that he has been forsaken, burned, left behind.)
After hours, when it is quiet, when all the pilgrims and the City boys have gone home, he perches on the rim of the dome of St. Paul’s, pulling feathers he cannot recognise from wings in which he might not believe. A gust of wind curls over the sphere behind him, and he allows it to pluck the feather from his fingers, watches it dance away, silhouetted by the fulvous, rubescent clouds. It is dove-white with an inner glow against the lurid horizon.
In his mind’s eye, he sees Sherlock poised on the guard rail, a wash of grey from tip to tip, a prism without colour, a chandelier, a million surfaces now ash, now ebony-sometimes, the palest blue-as he pivoted on his scuffed oxfords to survey the settlement below, the human habitation they’d been sent to protect.
Wings fully outspread for stability, he was, even in his ambiguity and ambivalence, Glory. Every sharp line of him, everything that lay in shadow, every illuminated pale expanse of skin; the dark curls as though he’d escaped a Rubens, the proud tilt of his spine that said that everything he saw was, in a sense, his (pride being the sin he had always indulged); all of it spoke of his Creator, as though he was at once encomium and emulation. And he wore it all as casually as he wore his coat.
It took Mycroft’s breath away.
Then, as in so many other instances, and with a frisson of blasphemy, he had quietly thanked not Mr. Mountjoy, but Edward the Confessor for requiring a separate and permanent court upriver, so close one could simply reach out across the rooftops and touch.
~
Why, then, was it Sherlock who had first begun to falter?
Sherlock the cherished; Sherlock, who might have sung ‘holy, holy, holy’, but who had been sent to Mycroft instead, like a gift or a blessing; Sherlock, whose beauty was the very flame of being, which was never still, which set light to everything it touched, and which was irresistible to all creatures, mortal and celestial.
For Mycroft, it was a need and an instinct, born of his very nature. He had no more choice in the matter than did a millwheel in the matter of whether or not to revolve under the physical compulsion of a river. Although he had made more than one career out of performing complex calculations and formulating sophisticated analyses on behalf of the British Government since long before it had been the British (English, Britannic) Government, his heart was simple. His love was absolute. He found it an inescapable compulsion.
He was, had always, would always be drawn to Sherlock-as an extension of Mr. Mountjoy. As a stray beam from the sun behind clouds. And his desire for Mr. Mountjoy lies somewhere between his rather human need for breath and the very inhuman meaning at the centre of what he is.
But Sherlock had always been different.
~
After all, it was one of his rank who had initiated the line of inquiry that launched the rebellion in the first place.
One just like Sherlock who had asked the first question.
Mycroft could all too easily picture Sherlock accruing the evidence, assembling the deductions, casting the most damning objections.
~
What this means is that the game they’d played with Sherlock could only ever have been seduction.
Fire needs so many things. It needs oxygen. It needs heat. It needs something to burn. Sherlock required the constant din of battle; he relentlessly sought the next chase, the next skirmish, the next triumphant victory. It was as though even on earth he was ceaselessly declaiming, his actions shouts, and he couldn’t stop because he needed to hear it, needed to hear the alleluia. And all the other voices were too distant, or too soft. Mycroft’s voice was too soft. His form of the paean, too dull and colourless to take the edge off Sherlock’s hunger.
No, it isn’t Mycroft, and it wasn’t ever going to be Mycroft. Mycroft was dazzled minder, besotted nanny. Mycroft did half of Sherlock’s work for him, when Sherlock couldn’t be bothered to actually help, except in that truculent, contrary way he had decided was good enough if he said it was, even if it wasn’t what Mountjoy had directed. (Solving murders. Getting involved with the already dead, when by then it wasn’t up to him anymore what happened to them. To think that Mycroft had been relieved, back in 1875-or was it 73?-when Sherlock had started detecting rather than advising, or, more often, just running around blatantly not doing what he’d been sent to do at all. It isn’t Mycroft’s contention that stopping those violent criminals isn’t a form of grace, it is simply that there is so much more than that to be done. An entire, growing city to safeguard.)
~
That it had to be him, though-always him, always one of the original cadre-, and using them, their flock! It is ineluctible and unjust and maddening.
Moriarty.
Mycroft shivers, rustling restively in the dying light as he summons to his mind the most recent earthly form of the one who calls himself Jim Moriarty. That image will never cease to be unnerving. Somehow, it is always the same form, even when it isn’t, the same fevered body, the face that can morph from absolute, almost catatonic indifference to insane and uncontrolled rictus in the blink of an eye. The energy that seems untethered from the vessel, as though the coupling didn’t quite take. Mycroft doesn’t know why this last characteristic, in particular, should bother him so. He can’t exactly blame it on a discomfort with the incorporeal. It’s the dissonance, perhaps. The grating sensation of metals vibrating mercilessly against one another. Demonic-all too apt.
He hates to think what it must be like, inside Moriarty’s head.
It’s possible there isn’t really anything left inside Moriarty’s head at all, only hell and rage and a singular purpose, bring it all down, topple the blocks, turn everyone, convince them all, we were right and He was wrong, tempt them all over the edge, plunge all of creation into the pit. He makes it look a game, but at the end of it the pieces shatter and the board burns and no one wins. At the end of it, it’s just blood, on the walls and in the street, and stone that weeps, and Mr. Mountjoy will be upset, but it’s Moriarty’s lot who will have lost, Moriarty’s lot and all of humanity. Every soul Mycroft has worked so hard for so many centuries to protect.
~
Why is Sherlock susceptible to Moriarty’s manipulation? Mycroft’s thoughts circle again and again to the same question, the one he has already failed to answer.
If it was boredom, if Sherlock had hoped to go home, there had to have been another way. Mycroft, too, has wanted- Mycroft, too, has waited, and toiled, in vain.
~
There’s blood on the pavement, commingled with cold and metal-tanged rain, ferrous puddle like a black reflecting pool. By the time Mycroft composes himself to emerge from the lee of the old brick hospital, the human drama has dissipated: the crowd, the gurney, the sympathetic bystander gently helping the grieving friend away. On the empty stone that remains, a tepid cocktail of serum and sugars and cellular material, mimicry of human life, stains the bones of Mycroft’s London.
~
The centuries suddenly stretch away from him in both directions. Perspective shifts like the walls of a funhouse tunnel. An underground station, roiling with water, with explosions. With panic. Mycroft moves through the Flood and the rubble like he’s drowning in wet earth. Mud.
And then, and then: and-then
the Fall.
A swan dive into the Thames. Mycroft surfaces.
Sherlock’s body in the colourless morgue is an abandoned vessel, containing nothing. Mycroft sends the girl away and stands regarding this cooling shell with grim, determined indifference. He does not retch again.
The mortal flesh keeps silence. Mycroft doesn’t need to see the broken body to know that Sherlock is gone; he felt the departure as surely as he feels the smooth coldness of the steel surface hard beneath his palms. The body isn’t Sherlock, but Mycroft has grown accustomed to its scent, alive, its contours, its hue, the amount of physical space it occupies.
And he has never…other assets are assigned, recalled, deployed again. New body, new name, new face, new identity. What is it like to return? Is it damnation, or is it joy? Mycroft doesn’t know how that cycle feels because he has inhabited only one terrestrial form since the beginning. He has only ever worked with his sole equal and one peer (the closest thing he could have to a friend). He has only ever been anchored to one city, one place on all the earth. His City. Theirs.
He has almost forgotten what it is like to be himself and not to be this body. It is a familiar and comfortable home for a spirit that no longer knows how to exist untethered.
~
Mycroft doesn’t need to see his brother’s body on the slab to know that he is once again alone, but seeing it like this, he’s angry.
Angry at Sherlock for taking the risk. Angry at Sherlock for leaving him. Angry that he should listen to Moriarty’s profane seditions, his obscene impieties. Mycroft didn’t need CCTV to bear witness. The words he didn’t hear echo in his head.
But you’re boring. You’re on the side of the angels.
~
But I’m not my brother, remember? I am you.
~
Just once, unobserved, Mycroft allows his composure and self-restraint to slip. Power surges through the room; circuits overload. Lights blow out around the windowless crypt, plunging it into darkness, a darkness in which a suited, winged figure shines too brightly to be seen, raging at the blind unjustness.
It changes nothing. Somewhere above him, there is yet more blood (they’re not human, they shouldn’t be able to bleed, but there is the evidence, the tithe in ichor), more brain and bone splattered across the building. The difference is Moriarty knew exactly the terrifying place he was going when he swallowed his gun, knows very well he’ll be sent back as he always has, to do his master’s wicked work. It’s a meaningless gesture. A taunt. A dare.
I’ll do it if you’ll do it.
But Mycroft’s little brother couldn’t deduce his sentence. Mountjoy works in mysterious ways.
“Sherlock,” Mycroft entreats the emptiness. “Where have you gone?”
His own voice sounds tenuous and frail. The vowels and consonants fail to carry, smothered by cold storage units and seamless epoxy flooring.
~
Angels fall and they could land anywhere. Mr. Mountjoy’s judgment is famously capricious. The wholesale banishment, that first irreparable fracturing of their family, had been a shock to all.
Generally, though, dying on the job is seen as a failure.
Sherlock might belong to Moriarty’s kind now. He might be mortal, or dead. He might be basking in the Divine Presence, sitting at His feet like a favourite pet called in out of the cold.
For precisely half a beat of his too-human heart, Mycroft hates him.
~
That there is no return, Mycroft suspects. But whether there has ever been a choice, he doesn’t know.
For where was Mercy when the damned were cast into perdition? When their eldest brother tried to crawl to Eden, belly scraping shards and gravel? When that place into which they plummeted was made at all?
They are Mycroft’s brothers, too.
Even Moriarty.
But don't be scared. Falling's just like flying except there's a more permanent destination.
And Sherlock? …Prepared to do anything. Prepared to burn….You want me to shake hands with you in hell, I shall not disappoint you.
It is little wonder Moriarty reads as a lunatic, that they all do.
~
Up on the roof again, his own eternal condemnation. The alabaster cathedral looms behind him, Westminster amber in the distance. He sees the scene so clearly, though it has all been cleared away as perfectly as though it were never there at all.
It is as though their moving shadows have been burned into the air: the way they danced around each other with eyes and words, re-enacting a battle none of them can let go, deluding themselves it is a game.
And Moriarty had only to reveal the pieces, had only to make his move, check and mate. And then the world would topple, Mycroft’s world, headfirst with the dark-haired figure who cared, for the first time, and was undone.
Because Sherlock had never become involved before. Centuries had gone by in aloof watchfulness, with kindness and compassion yes, but disinterested compassion, theoretical kindness. Because Sherlock, who had loved with his entire being, indeed who had thrown himself whole into everything he ever decided to do, had never been able to bring himself to understand humanity before, to see that he was like them, made in the same image.
Then, one day, there had been a human being in trouble.
One man who had needed Sherlock. A man who had loved Sherlock, in his human way.
John Watson had taught Sherlock to care, and he had taught Sherlock about being human, and that is the sort of weakness the other side will prey on, when you let it become personal.
When you let yourself want something you were not meant to have.
~
Mycroft remembers, indelibly, the first time he had touched John Watson. The soldier’s hand, the doctor’s hand, in both of his. The soul he had cradled, too, for just one moment, inspecting it for the hidden tremor, the weariness and the courage and the fierce goodness. And the earthy, human joy in life, no less bright for its brevity.
~
He had seen, that time, how the need ran like a vein of ore through the man, and he had known that a matching seam divided Sherlock, recognised it because it was the seam that held Mycroft together.
He has seen, many times since that first, heady reconnaissance, how Sherlock, drawn by the same impulse, would deliberately touch John. A casual brush of the fingers, a calculated inclination of the body. A simultaneous move to possess and protect.
~
When you care about something, you can be threatened. And when you can be threatened, you can be turned. Love is a vicious motivator.
This is the oldest problem, to which Mycroft has no answer.
Once again, finally, the scene: Moriarty and Sherlock on the hospital roof. Mountjoy’s houses in the backdrop. They are on their own up there, suspended between earth and heaven, all of creation unable to reach them. John and Mycroft each trapped in helpless isolation in the endgame below.
Then, for a breath held over a heartbeat, over the space between two rooftops, close enough to touch, there is only Sherlock hanging alone on the precipice.
~
In the present, Mycroft leans over empty space, gazes down at the fall and sees nothing. The City has swallowed Sherlock.
London has eaten one of her own guardians, and the pavement has sealed over the wound.
~
“We ought to show them the truth.”
“We can’t do that. They must decide for themselves.” Mycroft balances his weight on the handle of his umbrella. Once, it might have been the hilt of a sword.
“Isn’t transparency desirable these days? How can they decide for themselves if they haven’t got all the data?”
Vexed-frightened-exhalation, and a moment’s pause to gather himself, to stop his voice going timorous. He forces it instead to be the measured instrument of reason. “This is what the rebels said. This is how Heaven was ripped asunder. Would you have the same fate befall the Earth? And expedite the end of all things?”
Sherlock makes a face. Wrinkles his nose. “It wouldn’t come to that. Would it? They’re not as idiotic as they seem. Are they?”
Mycroft sees he can offer no convincing arguments, and none of the sought-after reassurances, so he says nothing. What would you do, he wonders, if it turned out they are?
But Sherlock posits his own resolutions (when necessary, creates his own truth, Mycroft thinks with the thrill of sacrilege).
“I mean, John isn’t.”
~
And then…Sherlock falls.
It’s faith (in Mr. Mountjoy, in humankind, in himself) that draws him in the end, coat flapping like a parachute he refuses to open. More tableau of human commitment than reflection of that original, struggling plummet. Call it love, call it caring. Or perhaps compassion, or irresponsibility.
It is a drop of salt water in the solution of Mycroft’s heart. All of the questions, all the uncertainties, the ambiguities crystallise into one sharp loss.
Mycroft regards the indifferent street, and then he draws away and turns his considerable attention to the sky.
“Now, what?” he asks.
It is the firmament, but it might as well be mute and inanimate stone, for all it has anything to say in reply.
~
And then-