starfishstar

SHADOW AND SHADE

Fandom: BBC Sherlock

Summary:

“I didn’t need your help,” Sherlock sniffed, turning back to his object of study.

Mycroft sighed. “Yes, yes, I’m sure you didn’t.”

Characters: Sherlock, Mycroft

Words: ~1,900

Notes:

Inspired by a brief line in chapter 10 of "The Printer Is Jammed" by startrekto221B, spoken by Sherlock: “Mycroft is seven years my elder. I grew up in his shadow, but it was not altogether distasteful, after all, a shadow also provides shade.”

Um, this started out as a fluffy Mycroft-and-Sherlock moment. I’m not sure what happened. Maybe Mycroft and Sherlock happened.

Thank you to

stereolightning for beta-reading…and hedgehog research!

Story also at AO3!

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

No one played as intensely as Sherlock did, Mycroft thought. Even in his supposed downtime, in his hours away from the lessons and tasks Mummy and Daddy were constantly devising to keep his voracious mind halfway content, Sherlock’s concentration was fierce, his activities conducted with a focus that bent his whole body to his task.

Today, Mycroft found him in the garden.

Ah, a dissection. Yet again. Mycroft wrinkled his nose in distaste. Sherlock did so love getting his hands dirty. And this trait that had been to some extent charming in a small child was no longer so endearing in a nearly-eleven-year-old.

It was a hedgehog, Mycroft saw, stepping closer. Sherlock must have found it dead here at the base of the hedge. He wouldn’t have killed a creature merely for the opportunity to take it apart. For all the addled psychologists’ diagnoses of psychopathy, Mycroft knew better, knew Sherlock was all too capable of empathy for animals and small, helpless things. Redbeard had been proof. Far more proof than anyone could have wished.

Sherlock’s curly head was bent low over his work, his body coiled with attention and his hands deft, although Mycroft avoided looking too closely at what precisely Sherlock’s fingers probed. One of the best things about university-level study, Mycroft was finding, was the opportunity to analyse and synthesise the results of others’ work, without having to muck about obtaining those results himself. It was a far more efficient use of his own brainpower.

Sherlock, though, was never satisfied until he’d broken a thing down to its component parts with his own eyes and hands and mind, and understood every bit of what made it work. Mummy had long since despaired of keeping any electronic device in the house safe from Sherlock’s dissecting fingers. He was precise in his work and never damaged any components, but could only occasionally be counted on to reassemble the things he took apart once he was done with them – Sherlock tended to lose interest in a thing the instant he understood it, already moving on to the next puzzle.

The living body, however – or the dead body, as in this case – had sustained his interest for some time now. Sherlock had breezed through Daddy’s anatomy books and quickly exhausted the resources of the local museums. So, in his first semester at university, Mycroft had purloined the course material from an advanced anatomy lecture – obtained from a medical student in exchange for some interesting information of a personal nature Mycroft had acquired – and sent it home in packets for his brother.

Sherlock had scoffed at the gift and at the very idea that he needed Mycroft’s help in anything, but when Mycroft had come home for the Christmas holiday, he’d found Sherlock elbow-deep in the anatomy papers, frowning in concentration.

And now, in the pale spring sunshine of Easter, Sherlock was in the garden, learning the secrets of dead things.

“You are blocking my light,” Sherlock said, without looking up. “If you must stand there gawping, kindly move to the side so your enormous silhouette isn’t blotting out the sun.”

Yes, Mycroft had gained weight at university and was unhappy with it, as Sherlock had instantly deduced at Christmas.

Mycroft reminded himself that it didn’t matter; if it weren’t that, Sherlock would have found something else to be rude about. Sherlock desperately needed the socialisation of other children to temper his tendency to say whatever would move him most expediently toward achieving his goals, no matter how unkind, but every attempt Daddy and Mummy had made to integrate Sherlock with other children ended in tears. Not Sherlock’s tears, of course. The tears of all others involved, including the children and sometimes their parents.

Hence the homemade lessons, Mycroft thought, as he grimaced at the back of Sherlock’s head but stepped to the side, out of the direct line of the sun. Hence the back garden dissections.

Mycroft cast a long shadow across his brother’s life, he knew. Not just seven years older, but also clever and wiser – and infinitely better at pretending, when necessary, not to be either of those things. Sherlock resented Mycroft’s ability to move with comparative ease among the strange, dull people who surrounded them, and could not forgive Mycroft for the ways he helped and translated and tried to smooth his prickly brother’s passage through an unforgiving world.

“Ah!” Sherlock cried, suddenly ecstatic, as his probing fingers found what they had sought. “Look!”

In his excitement and his need for an audience to witness his brilliance, he forgot to be disdainful of Mycroft’s presence and thrust his hand into the air, holding aloft something tiny, glistening and red. Mycroft blanched.

“Fatty liver,” Sherlock decreed, with the cool, knowledgeable air of a veteran medical professional. He lowered his hand and cradled the object in his palm. “Happens to hedgehogs because they’re gluttons, and they’ll eat any human foods they come across, and keep eating even if it kills them.” Then he looked up at Mycroft and sneered, no longer looking the least bit professional. “Is it mortifying, knowing the whole world can see you have no more self-control than a morbidly obese hedgehog?”

“Sherlock,” Mycroft snapped, his patience for his brother’s incivility finally breaking. “Are we devolving to childish insults? Perhaps those who are so gratingly unpleasant that they find themselves incapable of making a single friend should not be hasty to throw stones.”

Sherlock’s eyes snapped to Mycroft’s, his head jerking back and his face going white. Mycroft’s throat constricted, and for a terrifying moment he couldn’t breathe. It was so easy to forget Sherlock had feelings under his terrible manners. It was so easy to forget he was, after all, only a child.

“Sherlock –” Mycroft began, when he could breathe again.

A far less welcome voice cut in, with a nasal whine: “Ewww, what are you doing, you freak?”

The neighbours’ son. Ten and a half months Sherlock’s senior, with an exceedingly shallow mind. Hanging over the garden fence that separated the two properties, with elbows propped on the topmost board of the fence, dishwater hair flopping in his eyes and an insipid grin on his face.

With an ease born of long practice, Mycroft’s features slid into the politely detached expression he wore with all people who were neither Sherlock nor their parents. This new nuisance could be dispatched with little to no effort on his part, of course, but how tiresome to have to do it.

“Gross, why are you touching that?” There was cruel glee in the boy’s voice. “You’re such a freak.”

Pedestrian attempts at insults, but Sherlock’s shoulders were cinching ever more tightly toward his ears, and his hand clenched protectively around its small discovery.

Mycroft straightened and pivoted toward the boy with a rictus of a smile.

“My brother is conducting a necropsy out of both natural curiosity and a desire to further his scientific understanding. Whereas you, small and small-minded child of our unfortunate acquaintance, have a brain so stunted that your idea of a clever series of insults is to say the same vaguely derogatory word twice, with a slight additional emphasis on the second iteration to make it sound as though you are saying something new. I, on the other hand, if I wished to discomfit you, should merely deduce from the appearance of your family’s garden that your father is currently engaging in an extramarital affair with a subordinate at his workplace roughly fifteen years his junior, give or take a margin of error of two years in either direction, and that your mother is aware of this state of affairs – no pun intended, I assure you – but chooses to suppress that knowledge and subvert her nervous energy instead into compulsive landscaping endeavours in your already overly tidy garden. I could furthermore, if I wished, infer from the state of your back patio that your father has disappointed the rest of the family on either two or three occasions, leaving you sitting without him on evenings that were supposed to be festive outdoor family dinners, presumably because he chose instead to spend that time with his lover.”

“I – what?” the boy said, his mouth hanging open like that of a particularly imbecilic fish. Out of the corner of his eye Mycroft saw Sherlock, rapt, watching the boy’s falling face.

Mycroft sighed. “Need I repeat myself?”

“My dad’s not having an affair! He’s not!”

“Are you so certain? Well, then I suppose there would be no harm in going inside and asking your mother about it.”

The boy darted a glance between Mycroft and Sherlock. Sherlock still knelt by his specimen, one hand curled around the organ he’d been examining. He was studiously not looking at Mycroft, but his body was intent with listening.

“But do make sure to ask her about it before she’s had a chance to see your latest marks from school,” Mycroft suggested to the boy. “You wouldn’t want to catch her when she’s already feeling disappointed. Only 55% or so on the last maths quiz, wasn’t it?”

The boy gaped. “You’re…you’re horrible,” he whispered, his face pale behind its freckles. “How do you know that? Why would you talk about my marks? You’re mean.”

“Yes.” Mycroft gave him another constricted smile, but stayed otherwise motionless. “And now, run along.”

The boy stared for another moment, then the freckled face and floppy hair vanished behind the line of the fence, and feet pattered away behind it. For a blissful space of several seconds, all was silent.

“I didn’t need your help,” Sherlock sniffed, turning back to his object of study.

Mycroft sighed. “Yes, yes, I’m sure you didn’t.”

“He calls me names like that all the time. I don’t care.”

But something in that utterance, in the way he said all the time, gave him away. Sherlock did care, but he thought he wasn’t allowed.

Mycroft shouldn’t have been so rude to the neighbour boy, he knew that. He should have turned the interaction around, steered it into camaraderie between the two boys rather than antagonism. He could have done it, of course, impossible opposites though Sherlock and this neighbour child seemed. But he hated to think of saddling his brother with a compatriot who would value him so little.

He also hated to think of Sherlock going through life alone.

Mycroft grimaced as he pictured long years of fractious Sherlock battling his way through the world, offending everyone he met despite his undeniable brilliance, never understanding why he couldn’t find the admiration and acceptance he craved.

Mycroft looked ahead and saw lonely university years, Sherlock hunched alone over a microscope in some lab late at night, when all the other students had gone off to parties or whatever social things it was that they did. He saw his brother frustrated in an itinerant and unsatisfying work life, because what job could ever hold Sherlock’s attention for long? He saw Mummy and Daddy growing old and infirm, then dying, leaving no one else but Mycroft capable of translating between Sherlock and the world.

Light and shadow played over the back of Sherlock’s shirt where he bent over his experiment, deft hands moving in the sunlight, wholly absorbed and oblivious to the world. Oblivious to his brother looming above and behind him, watching.

No, not quite oblivious. “Still blocking the light,” Sherlock mumbled, though his focus remained fixed on his work.

Mycroft spared his brother a tight smile and stepped to the side, just slightly, not far. He would still be here if called upon. For as long as Sherlock needed, Mycroft would be his shade.