Challenge: Choices
Title: Complications
Author: godsdaisiechain
Fandom: Sherlock
Type: Fic
Characters/Pairing: Sherlock, Mycroft
Word Count: ~850
Rating: PG


Mycroft

Feelings.  Mycroft Holmes abhorred feelings. They so complicated things that needn’t be anything except simple. Bothersome feelings. He rustled his newspaper impatiently. The other members of his club looked up sharply and Mycroft made an apologetic moue.

He admitted, internally, that pathos could be useful as a distraction for the goldfish that surrounded him.  Play on the emotions and then stand back until the metaphorical dust settled.

Mycroft preferred not to be sullied by actual dust.  Strongly preferred.  There were people for that, after all.

Sherlock had been gone for over a year now.  It didn’t trouble Mycroft. Sherlock was stupid. That had been the one topic on which he could agree with Moriarty. Stupid Sherlock.  Although not nearly as stupid as John Watson.  Imagine believing that Sherlock was actually dead.  How could the man have accepted the absence of any family at the funeral? Molly Hooper had stayed away. How many clues could one leave? Even that ridiculous Anderson figured it out.

Yet Sherlock was convenient in a number of ways.  He was clearly smarter than the average goldfish. And Sherlock could be sent on the types of bothersome practical assignments that Mycroft eschewed.

So it was not that Mycroft missed Sherlock as Sherlock.  Not as a brother or a man.  Not in the slightest.  And it was quite certainly not that Mycroft missed John Watson or Mrs. Hudson. Most certainly not.  He simply needed Sherlock to attack the Underground terrorist group, making his choice to rescue his baby brother merely an act of pragmatism.

Hopefully it would not take Sherlock too long to realize that he meant Underground and not underground.

Sherlock

The anxiety had risen from a deep place Sherlock tried to keep locked away in a disused cupboard of his mind palace, usually successfully. But that night a nagging ache in the space behind his breastbone woke Sherlock from a dream of Baker Street.  He forced his heart to settle into its usual regular rhythm, glad that the long hair covered his face, hiding his expression from his sleeping companion.

Most of Sherlock presumed that John existed in a type of stasis, waiting for him to come back.  John Watson had to have figured out that Sherlock Holmes was alive.  He had said as much, standing by the empty grave, hadn’t he?  After all, even Anderson had figured out that he was still alive.  And it wasn’t as if he had a choice. He’d been assigned to neutralize Moriarty long before John Watson had limped into what passed for his life.

He didn’t miss John. Not precisely, although there was a sort of void sometimes. It was worse at night, when the shadows crept in. Sherlock knew he had been foolish to start to rely too much on anyone, or at least anyone particular. And, at times, a vague worry intruded, telling him that no one was tending to John. Not that Mrs. Hudson wouldn’t be plying him continually with tea and talk. And even those tasty little biscuits. Someone needed to see to John’s walking and feeding, at least to feeding his hunger for adventure and violence.  Sherlock resisted the urge to rub his sternum.


John

The nightmares had returned, the ones that had nearly crippled him on his return to London.  The ones that had disappeared the evening he shot that taxi driver.  Nothing seemed to allay them now that Sherlock was gone.

He dated a series of women, each undistinguishable from the next in his foggy brain.  He remembered their names, usually, but nothing further.  The worst had been the night he showed up at the wrong door with flowers.  He still flinched whenever he saw roses.

Then she showed up.  Mary.  Vulnerable, sweet Mary.  She seemed so uncertain, so eager to please.  Innocent.  Something so unlike anything he had ever been drawn to.

The night he kissed her, John slept more soundly than he had since the day he saw Sherlock Holmes drop to the street from the roof of St. Bart’s.  If he had not been so distracted for so long, John Watson may have thought to wonder why that was.

Mary

It hadn’t been easy to leave that life.  Or nonlife.  It was safer, somehow, being a spy, despite the more obvious types of danger.  Killing for a living.  Never getting too close to anyone.  Emotionally safer, at least.

Except for the small matter that the choice to stay aloof and separate was the choice of a sort of living death. Or even a sort of evil. One day it had been enough, and she left, carefully erasing her tracks, blending away.

The day she saw him, limping along behind a bristly mustache, something in her shifted.  She needed this. It had been hard, hard to stay. It was hard to choose each day.  Choose to stay and not to run the way she had every time her heart had ever been moved before.

But he chose her.

A small chill ran up her spine whenever he spoke about Sherlock.  She didn’t know why until he came back. Because Sherlock was just like her.