Reservations
For the Sherlock #mayprompts2024.
Prompt: Experiment
Mycroft Holmes considers his life choices, and the possibility of new ones.
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My brother seems happy. It is a state of affairs I had not foreseen.
I would have been content had he become merely stable – resistant to the drug compulsion, able to self-regulate, to optimise his talents without the displays of arrogance and emotionality that marred his fortunes for so long. He craved applause and admiration from the first, my brother; he could not be content, as I learned to be, with the knowledge that he had accomplished his purpose.
I was young when I grasped the advantages of self-control. My talents fitted me for the career I have chosen – the ability to perceive patterns, to calculate for human weakness and bias, to plan for contingencies as does a chess master. I found mentors at Eton who were quick to groom me for the calling, all the while thinking that they had discovered me.
But I have, also, always been of my brother’s selfsame – inclination, shall we say. I had long known where my attractions lay, and set about to starve them; it was clear I could not afford the liabilities of sentiment, the distraction of relationships. I knew, too, that my tropism could be a stumbling block in the path I meant to walk. Section 28 is not that far behind us even now; I had no illusions about what it would mean, then, to betray an affinity for others of my own sex.
And I had Responsibilities. From a young age Sherlock was my charge -- unable to cloak his differences or his scorn for the less gifted, to avoid provoking the hostility of the polite mob which is the British boarding-school. His one salvation was that, like myself, he found the cerebral more seductive than the physical. I encouraged this in him; encouraged him to pursue the peace he found in detachment, in deduction, repeating over and again the mantra that caring is not an advantage.
And yet. It is his bond with Doctor Watson, more than anything, which has saved him. I saw the shipwreck that was my brother – who had been, only a short time before, a malnourished scarecrow careening from doss house to doss house – transformed by his association with an ordinary Army doctor; eating almost regularly (how many times had I admonished him that he required fuel for his transport?), clean of the pharmacy that had for years coursed through his bloodstream, even of (at least inhaled) nicotine. (In an unguarded moment at school I myself sampled tobacco, and grew fond of the mental energy and clarity it induced; today I ration myself to an occasional lapse.)
I confess I felt a certain envy. Initially I saw Watson as merely another pair of eyes, an agent who could report back on my brother’s welfare; the depth and suddenness of his loyalty caught me on the back foot, as I am rarely caught. I had my reservations, but chose to let the experiment proceed. And Sherlock blossomed; he eschewed the drug dens and questionable chemists', his eccentric career flourished, he enjoyed all the adulation he could have wished, even to the point of being surfeited with it.
I should have seen the fall coming – the literal fall he had to orchestrate, as well as the fall from grace. The public is fickle; it is an error to court the opinion of the many. I told him as much while we changed his appearance, his identity, smuggled him out of the country. You are now, I said, no longer Sherlock Holmes, with all that means for ill or good; no one recognises your abilities or achievements, and for your sake and that of Britain they must not. Learn to live with it.
He made no answer to that. He said only, as he boarded the craft that would take him out of my sight but not my ken, “Look after John.” I was left wondering at this unexpected capacity for attachment.
Their reunion was another of my few miscalculations. I had allowed matters with the Morstan woman to go too far: I was certain, given what I had seen, that my brother’s reappearance would end that connection, which I had followed keenly as one indiscretion after another on her part opened the book of her history page by page. I had not counted on the complexity of John’s feelings at Sherlock’s reappearance, or on Sherlock’s reaction: retreating into his shell – and, before long, into old habits – at the blow of seeing John pledge himself to someone else. I repeated to him again, oftener than I thought I would ever need to again: caring is not an advantage.
Yet now she is gone, and John survives, and so, after everything, does the bond that holds these two damaged men together – the valence that means one cannot thrive without the other, that appears to make them whole, a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.
It is a conundrum. It leads me to speculate that I have committed yet one more miscalculation.
I have here in my waistcoat-pocket the business card of the Detective Inspector who befriended Sherlock when he was still on the street; who has been his guardian angel over the years when he resisted such oversight from me; who has conferred with me time and again about my brother’s welfare. Sherlock has found his stable ground with his doctor, yet I look back – warmly, if I must confess it – on the occasions when it was necessary to work with Lestrade, and regret the likely loss of his society going forward.
He is unmarried now, and at last report uncoupled, and a remark here and there in the past suggests that his attractions may be no more rigidly conventional than John Watson once thought his.
Sherlock and his doctor began by dining together. It is not strange for two gentlemen whose paths intersect in life to do so, to strike up an acquaintance beyond the merely professional. I have made a reservation at Da Terra – a choice which marks the occasion as special but eschews the white-and-silver opulence that would discomfit a man on a Yard Inspector’s salary. Gratitude, I will say, for all the years he looked after my brother. A wish to enjoy his company, to which I have grown accustomed. And perhaps, by happy chance, there will be something more.
It will be an experiment.
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