starfishstar

HOLLY TO THE IVY

Fandom: BBC Sherlock

Summary:

It’s Christmas – Sherlock’s first Christmas home from uni – and neither Holmes brother needs anyone.

Definitely not.

Characters: Sherlock, Mycroft, and briefly Mummy Holmes

Words: ~2,700

Notes: To me, this completes the arc of my Mycroft and Sherlock stories – a series of one-shots about the two of them as kids/young adults that I'm now calling “Brothers, Bitter and Sweet.” This story can stand alone, or can be read as continuing the themes in those stories ("Sherlock Holmes and the Mystery of Father Christmas," "The Truth Will Break Your Heart," "Shadow and Shade"). And I find it pleasingly congruent that this story is set at Christmas, and so was my very first Sherlock story, one year ago.

Thank you to

stereolightning for beta-reading!

Story also at AO3!

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The holly and the ivy,
When they are both full grown,
Of all the trees that are in the wood,
The holly bears the crown.

–traditional

Oh roses for the flush of youth,
And laurel for the perfect prime;
But pick an ivy branch for me
Grown old before my time.

–Christina Rossetti

Today I will feel something other than regret
Pass me a glass and a half-smoked cigarette

–Laura Marling

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The slam of the back door seemed to reverberate through the kitchen long after Sherlock had banged through it and was gone.

“I only –” Mummy began, then stopped and sighed. She brushed a wisp of hair from her forehead, using the back of her hand since her palms were thick with bread dough. Mummy always insisted on doing all the Christmas baking herself.

Mummy’s hair, Mycroft noted from where he sat at the other side of the kitchen table, was increasingly more white than grey these days, and wispier and lighter than he remembered it having been even a few years before. Mycroft didn’t mind indicators of fallible mortality in other people – relished them, even, as weak points that could be leveraged to his own ends – but the same observation where Mummy was concerned brought an unaccustomed twinge of discomfort.

Mycroft dismissed that twinge just as quickly as it had come. Though he would never say it aloud, and certainly not now, at Christmas, Mycroft took firm satisfaction in having trained himself in perfect self-reliance long ago. He was twenty-four and already occupied a more than minor government position. The very notion that one might be an adult and yet still reliant on the support of a parent who would inevitably grow old and frail was…uncomfortable. Mycroft was glad to be long past that childish stage of dependence.

Unlike some people he could name.

“Myc, would you…”

“Yes,” Mycroft said, before she could finish the thought, and pushed himself up from the flour-strewn table with a frown. Better for all if his perpetual role as the wrangler of wayward Sherlock needn’t be spoken aloud.

Mycroft left Mummy in the kitchen that was fragrant with the smells of holiday baking, left Daddy somewhere behind them, likely stoking a recalcitrant fire in the living room grate. Mycroft slipped out to the back garden and shut the door gently behind him.

The air was damp, with a chill to it that suggested less Christmastime and more a cold, wet autumn. Mycroft fancied he could still smell wet leaves, although Daddy had clearly raked and tidied the garden recently.

Sherlock sat on the far garden wall, hunched over, legs dangling down in front of the neat square stones as if he were a child rather than a youth of seventeen, nearly eighteen. He’d let his hair go overgrown in his first months at university, and now it formed a tangled dark mess that fell into his face and obscured his pale, sharp eyes. He was scowling, of course. Sherlock rarely did otherwise these days.

He was also smoking frantically, his whole body curled tightly around the cigarette that was clutched between the fingers of his right hand.

Smoking as if it’s going out of style, Mycroft thought, then blanched inwardly at the hackneyed phrase. Mycroft did so detest clichés, but his brother always brought out the worst flights of flowery sentimentality in him.

“Sherlock,” Mycroft called across the garden. His brother refused to look up, although Mycroft knew Sherlock had heard him come outside.

Mycroft wished he too had a cigarette, or perhaps an attaché case or an umbrella, something to keep his hands from fidgeting. Damn Sherlock. No one else required such a degree of cagey concealment in conversation. No one else was fluent in Mycroft’s next to non-existent tells.

“Mycroft,” Sherlock sneered, not bothering to raise his voice, forcing Mycroft to walk closer to hear him. “Mummy sent you after me, I see. Come to smooth things over?”

“She didn’t mean anything by it,” Mycroft said wearily, though really there was no point, when it came to translating between Sherlock and the pedestrian, well-meaning world. “She worries for you. She wants you to be happy. She wishes you were making friends.” Mycroft couldn’t help but utter that last word with a small lip-curl of disgust. Despite his attempt to maintain aloofness, Sherlock smirked in response.

Then rage swept once again across his pale, angular face. “Friends!” he snapped. “Boring.”

He sucked frantically at his cigarette and Mycroft watched with morbid fascination, wondering if he might choke.

“People,” Sherlock continued between rapid drags on the cigarette, his voice rendered low and harsh by the smoke, working himself into some sort of fervour. “Friends. Girlfriends. ‘Met any nice girls, Sherlock?’” he mocked, in an eerily accurate imitation of Mummy’s cheerful voice. “Hah! I am not at university to meet girls.”

Sherlock ground his cigarette angrily against one of the stones of the wall, flung the butt at the ground below where his feet dangled, then shuffled in his pockets for another. He’d slammed out of the house wearing only a light jacket, but Mycroft knew better than to suggest that Sherlock ought to fetch himself something warmer to wear if he planned to sit outside much longer. Sherlock didn’t hold with taking anyone else’s opinion into account.

Still, Mycroft was feeling the bite of the chill air, even if Sherlock wasn’t. He had to resist the urge to fold his arms across his chest for warmth, as he stood and watched his brother.

Instead, he said mildly, “I believe you.”

Fumbling with his lighter, his usually deft hands rendered maladroit by the cold, Sherlock glanced up and glared suspiciously.

“No one who has met you, Sherlock, could possibly form the mistaken impression that you were attempting to ingratiate yourself with other human beings.”

For once without a sharp-tongued comeback, Sherlock simply glowered, and finally got his second cigarette alight. He dragged on it just as hard as he had done with the previous one, and Mycroft refrained from making the obvious comment about Sherlock ruining his health. Sherlock knew that already, and didn’t seem to care.

Sherlock’s eyes burned in his pale face, and Mycroft wondered if he was using drugs again. Or, more accurately, which drugs he was using, which substances formed his latest experiment on the fascinating subject of his own brain. It did no good to reason with him on the matter; Sherlock insisted he could start and stop as he liked, and likely that was true. For now.

Mycroft would have to keep an even closer eye on him, albeit from afar. In the privacy of his own mind, Mycroft allowed himself a quietly plaintive groan. Worrying about Sherlock already took up far too much of his days.

“Sherlock,” Mycroft said, the word coming out on a sigh. He shifted his stance, feeling the chill of the ground through the thin soles of his shoes. So like Sherlock to make this conversation happen outside in the cold, rather than somewhere comfortable. Mycroft thought longingly of the club he’d recently joined in London, with its armchairs and newspapers and blessed silence. Yet another reason to count the seconds until he could return to the city. “You don’t have to like people. No one is asking you to develop even the slightest liking for other people. But there is some value in learning to pretend.”

Sherlock scoffed, the noise transforming sharply into a cough as he exhaled wrongly. Not as expert a smoker, then, as he played at being.

“How dull,” Sherlock growled.

“Yes,” Mycroft agreed patiently. They had been having this conversation, in one form or another, since his brother had first learnt to talk. “It is very dull to rein yourself in to the expectations of other people. But, occasionally, a few moments of forced pleasantness are made up for by the utility they provide.”

“Not interested.”

“Believe me, little brother, I’m well aware it doesn’t come naturally, but with a bit of effort –”

“Not interested.”

Not for the first time, Mycroft wondered if Sherlock were perhaps more interested than he let on. For all Sherlock pretended to be hard and cold, in truth he was hopelessly ruled by his emotions, forever spilling over into messy histrionics. And for all Sherlock claimed to detest the tedium of other people, still Mycroft wondered. He knew that Sherlock craved, at the very least, an audience.

Mycroft thought for a moment of Redbeard, then carefully did not think of Redbeard.

Sherlock’s last true friend, and it had been a dog. What did that say about them, Mycroft and Sherlock?

Sherlock arched his back, ever incapable of staying still, and a low branch of the holly bush Mummy had planted at the bottom of the garden, just beyond the stone wall, scraped against his shoulder. Sherlock batted it away in annoyance with the hand not holding his cigarette. Then, curiosity piqued, he caught hold of the offending branch, glanced over his shoulder at its sharp-tipped leaves and bright berries, and gave a low laugh.

“Holly. Oh, of course, how predictable. Very much your sort of plant, isn’t it, Mycroft?”

Mycroft flicked idly through his mental file of the plant’s cultural associations. Sacred to druids, appreciated as one of the few plants in Britain’s woodlands to remain prominently green in winter when all else was bare, and thus unsurprisingly associated with the winter solstice and by extension Christmas. Hard, prickly leaves meant the plant came to represent stubbornness and protection, was believed even to repel lightning. The natural world’s king of the waning, darker half of the year, its boughs brought into the home to ward off evil.

Mycroft raised an eyebrow, his reaction only a fraction of a second behind Sherlock’s comment. “In what way?”

Sherlock snorted out a wry laugh and released the slim bough, letting it spring away from him. “Emetic,” he said succinctly. “Ingesting the berries can induce vomiting.”

He raised guileless eyes to meet Mycroft’s, challenging him to fill in the rest.

“Much akin to the experience of being lectured by an older brother?” It didn’t even qualify as a guess, not when Mycroft could follow his brother’s thought processes so easily.

Sherlock’s lips twitched minutely in response, which was more of a display of fellowship than he’d shown in years. Mycroft savoured the moment, knowing it wouldn’t last long.

“You do realise,” Mycroft said, as his brother dragged yet again on the cigarette that was now consumed almost down to its end, “you’re aligning yourself with the ivy plant by association. The feminine counterpart to holly.”

The holly and the ivy, both of them green in drab winter, ever locked in their mock battle for dominance, the two evergreens of the woods. Hard, woody holly, with its associations of unconditional love and sacrifice. Climbing ivy, representing attachment and dependence; but, too, a symbol of survival and perennial life, for its ability to suffer damage yet always return.

Sherlock laughed. “Wouldn’t you like to think so.” He took a last fierce drag on his expended cigarette and tossed it to the ground.

Like ivy, Sherlock needed protection, a strong stock on which to climb. Mycroft, at least, thought so; Sherlock, insensible of his own fragility, disagreed. It was a silent argument they would likely continue for the entirety of their lives.

Sherlock blew out a last breath of smoke and tipped his head back, eyes closed, pale throat exposed to the cold sky. Sherlock was too thin; he was always too thin, his long-limbed body all angles, especially now that he had shot up to something approaching his full height. Mycroft worried about him, but then, Mycroft always worried about Sherlock. Worrying about Sherlock came as naturally to Mycroft as breathing, and there was another detestably obvious metaphor.

“It’s easier for you,” Sherlock said quietly towards the sky, his eyes still closed, in a rare moment devoid of his usual combative defensiveness. “You don’t care about anything. And not caring must make it easier to pretend about all manner of things.”

Mycroft studied his brother, sitting there on the old stone wall of their parents’ garden as the dusk of an early winter evening settled around them, the greyish light growing dimmer and diffuse. It was so rare that Sherlock stopped moving and let himself be seen.

Mycroft observed the tired pouches under Sherlock’s eyes (disdain for such mundane things as sleep), the chemical burns on his fingers (insatiable thirst for knowledge via hands-on experiment), the nearly blue cast to his skin in the deepening cold (wilful disbelief in his own human vulnerability), the way he twitched with impatience even when sitting still. Mycroft’s reckless, maddening baby brother. An open book in so many ways to someone as observant as Mycroft, yet his heart remained a mystery.

“I can feel you staring,” Sherlock said lazily, eyes still closed. “Stop it.”

Sherlock, for all his brilliance, so often missed a crucial detail. He believed Mycroft to be free of the inconvenient complications of emotion, but that wasn’t quite true. Sherlock was his brother’s weakness, and always would be.

Perhaps, someday, Mycroft would tell him so.

Sherlock opened his eyes and let out a puff of air, a disdainful noise to tell Mycroft that he could come or go or look or turn away and it was all the same to Sherlock.

“Go inside, Sherlock,” Mycroft said, letting his very real impatience bleed into his otherwise expertly controlled tone. “You don’t have to apologise to Mummy for slamming out of the house, goodness knows she’s used to you by now, but go back in and pretend you care about her questions, or whatever thing she’s got it into her head to talk about now.”

“Why.” Sherlock said it flatly, with a challenge in the gaze he levelled at Mycroft. He managed to look archly superior even though he was seated and had to look up to meet his brother’s eyes.

“It’s Christmas,” Mycroft sighed. “Does there have to be a reason?”

“Some invented seasonal superstition is hardly cause to put up with any more inanity than usual,” Sherlock snarled, but it was the snarl that generally emerged as his last resort, when Mycroft had given Sherlock advice he didn’t want to follow, but that he secretly knew was right.

If Mycroft smirked a little, he hid it from Sherlock.

Sherlock kicked his heels against the stones, as if to prove he would stay as long as he wished. In the deepening dusk, his eyes and cheeks were shadows and his mouth a slim, vanishing line. Without the prop of a cigarette to lend him a purloined air of maturity, he looked very young. And hunched into himself against the cold, he looked so very small.

Then, with a snort of annoyance, Sherlock hopped down to the ground from his stone wall perch, settled his jacket about his shoulders as if it were some bespoke greatcoat rather than a tatty old thing Sherlock had borrowed from Daddy and never bothered to give back. He stalked past Mycroft towards the house, scowl firmly in place.

“Stop thinking so loudly, Mycroft,” Sherlock snapped as he passed. “It’s irritating.”

Then he was gone, in a cloud of huffy adolescent indignation and the stale odour of cigarettes. Mycroft heard the door to the house swing open and slam closed. He pictured the ensuing scene in the kitchen: Mummy fluttering around Sherlock, pushing biscuits at him until he acquiesced and ate something mainly to get her to shut up about it. Sherlock griping but perhaps also sensing, vaguely at best, that Mummy’s fussing was an expression of caring, and therefore not wholly useless.

Insufferable as Sherlock could be, Mycroft wished him everything his heart wanted.

Then he blanched. Ugh, how maudlin. The Christmas sentiment must be getting to Mycroft, too.

Detestable.

Mycroft made a sour face. Holidays, forced proximity to other people, and opportunities for Sherlock to mock him for his weight gain all ranked as things Mycroft generally loathed. And all would be abundantly on offer this evening.

And yet, somehow, the thought of returning to the warm kitchen with its scents of biscuits and fruit cake baking, its sounds of Mummy and Daddy chattering and Sherlock sniping and scoffing, was not wholly unpleasant. Good lord, he must be going soft.

Mycroft didn’t need anyone, of course. Mycroft never needed anyone. But still there was something quietly reassuring about knowing that Sherlock was here, safe in their parents’ home, for the moment at least.

Mycroft grimaced wryly to himself, before turning to join his brother inside the house.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

THE END

(Note: If you want to read the whole series, they're collected HERE.)