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The case finished fast and furious, with a chase through the alleys and over the rooftops, Sherlock at the head of what had come to feel like his own personal, private pack—Lestrade, John, Mary, Bill Wiggins. Spread wider the resources Sherlock had called in—Lestrade’s team, bolstered by the addition of constables from other units; MI6 personnel Mycroft had agreed to present, and of course the fierce, feral Irregulars from which Bill Wiggins had originally sprung. They drove the prey ahead of them, giving them no line of escape, herding them toward the MI6 unit that had been hunting them for over eight years.
It was bliss. It was heaven. Sherlock shouted when the blockade came in sight, laughing at the sight of the League brought to bay, unable to go further. He could hear the crackle and pop of com devices and short-wave radios in the background as team coordinated with team and unarmed agents moved aside to make way for the armed units.
He pulled to a stop on palisade of a great, looming Victorian building overlooking the blockade, and leaned, panting, as the League realized they’d been manipulated from the first. Ai-Li, that old fox, guessed soonest, and before Sherlock could shout warning he had his blades out. Not that he posed a threat—he’d reached his end, and chosen the honorable exit. Fine Chinese steel shone in the streetlights—then blood fountained, and Ai-Li went down. Beside him Aliesh screamed, seeing too late that her mentor had chosen death over captivity. After that it was too quick and too chaotic for even Sherlock to track, as officers and agents shot in and grabbed League members, cuffing them and bundling them into MVPs to be taken to destinations even Mycroft might not be able to access.
“God, what a run,” Mary said, coming up behind him. Her eyes burned, her face and hair shone like alabaster in the cold city lights. She looked over the edge. “Efficient, that lot. They’ll be gone before we can find the way down.”
Sherlock gave her a wicked, gleeful look, and shot a glance at the old cast iron gutter pipe running down the building. She laughed, and said, “Want to, then, tiger?”
He shook his head as John caught up, with Lestrade and Wiggins thundering behind. “No. We’ve done our part.” He flipped open his mobile and had Mycroft on autodial, even as John caught Mary in a one-armed hug and nuzzled at her neck. “Do get a room, John—there’s really no need to demonstrate your orientation for half London’s security forces to see.”
“Define need,” John muttered, and cuddled closer to his wife. Mary, as energized as John by the hunt, turned her face to him and kissed him, chuckling softly.
Sherlock twitched and turned away, grimacing. Then the phone connection opened, and Mycroft murmured into Sherlock’s ear…
“Well done, brother-mine. Well done. A superb hunt, if I do say so myself.”
“Vanity, thy name is Mikey,” Sherlock snapped. “You couldn’t have planned it out with such precision without the information I gathered.”
“I believe most of the information came by way of Mrs. Watson and Mr. Wiggins, working in concert with your street people.”
“Irregulars. Your point?”
Mycroft, on the other end, sighed heavily, his exasperation larger than life. “My point being you should distribute credit where it’s due. You weren’t the only contributing participant in this little tiger hunt.”
Sherlock sniffed, hearing John and Mary murmuring together behind him. It wasn’t jealousy, he thought, frowning. He loved John and Mary as a couple. If John had to be involved in sex in the first place, Mary was as good a choice as he could have made…and vice versa. It was the sex itself that set Sherlock on edge.
“I was the crucial participant,” he snapped, temper fraying as he dealt with annoyance from Mycroft and from his two dear friends. “Speaking of which—I’m also the only person you’ve contracted with directly. I’ll expect payment in a timely fashion?”
Mycroft huffed. “Be realistic. This is the government we’re talking about. Expect a check sometime before the next special election…no sooner.”
“My people don’t have the luxury of waiting.”
“You could pay them out of your trust fund.”
“You could pay them out of the family assets.”
“But they’re not in my personal employ. We have to keep the lines of finance straight and untangled, Sherlock. Payments are not fungible. The government can pay you. And you, of course, must pay your freelance mob. I, however, am in no way obligated, and to step in now would only muddle the bookkeeping.”
Sherlock growled. “Soon, Mike.”
“And in the meantime?”
“Fine—the payment from my fund requires your sign-off, though. And Wiggins has people who will be sleeping under bridges tomorrow night if I can’t pay tomorrow.”
“I’ll make the arrangements,” Mycroft agreed. Sherlock could swear he heard the smirk embedded in the single sentence. Sherlock’s trust fund was under the control of a trustee, due to difficulties in its prior management in Sherlock’s own hands. The trustee, of course, was Mycroft.
“See that the bank delivers cash,” Sherlock growled. “My people can’t use checks, and can’t wait while I get a check cashed.” He hung up, then, glowering.
“Mycroft pleased?” Lestrade said, coming up by Sherlock’s elbow.
“Delighted,” Sherlock spat, bitterly. “A mission that came out precisely as he planned, the official credit within the division going to him—and on top of it he gets to rub in his authority over all aspects of my finances.”
Lestrade had been around in the years of Sherlock’s downfall. He knew the history too well to sympathize all that profoundly, and he knew Sherlock too well to point out the justice of the current arrangement. “But it worked out the way he wanted?” he asked again. “Is he going to need any follow up? Any final threads that need to be tied off?”
“You’ll have to ask him,” Sherlock grumbled. He turned and looked over the rooftop. Wiggins was leaning against a tall metal smoke stack, studying the wrap-up underway below. John and Mary huddled together, no longer snogging, thank God, but unfortunately radiating the kind of clear signs that established that it was probably too much to hope they’d want to go out after for a pint or an order of Chinese. Lestrade shifted from foot to foot, knowing this stage of the operation was done.
“Mycroft will be over at his Westminster office tonight,” Sherlock said, sullenly. “You can probably find him there. He’ll know if he’s got more work for you, either officially with your team or unofficially through MI6 channels.”
Lestrade nodded. “Think I’ll be going, then,” he said, tugging at his overcoat and smoothing the line of its fall. “Sooner I talk the sooner I can call it a day.”
“I’m sure you’ve nothing better to do with your evening than creep off to bed,” Sherlock drawled, then glanced at John and Mary, heads bent toward each other, fingers delicately tracing the edges and lines of each other’s clothing. “It’s an open question when they’ll get any sleep.”
“Now, now, jealousy’s an ugly beast,” Lestrade said, glancing over and then back with a grin. “Nice to see a happy marriage.”
Sherlock snorted. “Tragic to think ‘happiness’ is the result of such primitive urges. The higher sentiments don’t seem to be reckoned into it.”
“Now you know that’s bollocks. John and Mary suit each other like bacon and brown sauce in a butty,” Lestrade said. “If anything you’ve got it backwards—instinct and urges might help get you together in the first place, but it’s those ‘higher sentiments’ that cut in after the first chemical rush is done.”
“As though you’d know,” Sherlock said, dismissively. He resented being lectured no matter what. Being lectured by a man with a failed marriage and nothing to show for his “urges” but a single man’s life cut him to the raw. “Talk to me about it when you’ve got a success to your credit.”
Lestrade’s mouth opened. His eyes flashed in quick anger. Then he gathered himself and let it go, looking away over the rooftops. “Fine. Whatever. Let me know when the pay comes in. Me and mine could use it, even if it isn’t much more than a token of the Foreign Office’s esteem.” He sloped off, leaving Sherlock sulking in the dark.
He sighed, glanced at John and Mary, and gave up. He approached Billy Wiggins, instead.
“Come by tomorrow evening. I should have pay for all the Irregulars by then.”
“Any chance you can spot me fifty quid tonight? Archangel’s lost her squat ‘cause she’s been out runnin’ for yez all week. Like to see her off the streets and wiff a full belly, if I can.”
Sherlock nodded, and fished for his wallet, drawing out the bills. “Consider it a gift,” he said. “Tell her she did well.”
“Aye. She did at that,” Billy said, and Sherlock sighed to himself again.
Lurv. Another of his people now made useless by longing.
He huffed and scowled.
It was a bitter end to a glorious hunt. He wanted more. He wanted—satisfaction. He narrowed his eyes, thinking of the humiliation of having to wait on Mycroft’s gracious help to get the pay he was owed.
He was quite capable of forging Mycroft’s signature, of course. He’d mastered that before he’d entered his teens, and he’d made sure to stay in practice. It was the coding and security that stood between him and his own damned trust fund.
He calculated. Mycroft was at the Westminster office, and would soon be joined by Lestrade, who would no doubt keep him occupied for at least a half-hour as he debriefed and attempted small-talk, as was his idiotic habit. Then add another half-hour for Mike to close down the office, and still more time to travel home.
If Sherlock was able to sneak into Mycroft’s flat, he was sure he could work out Mycroft’s organization and his computer passes. From there it should be no effort to determine the security codes and clearances to Sherlock’s money.
He smiled a tight smile, imagining Mycroft keying up the account only to find a private message from his baby brother. “Thanks for the effort, but I decided to take care of it myself.” Mycroft would have to spend the rest of the day changing passwords and reorganizing the security locks on his apartment. And swearing at his guards, of course. Not that they wouldn’t deserve the lecture…
Without bothering to say goodbye to any of his people, he disappeared into the shadows, climbing silently down the gutter pipe he’d pointed out to Mary earlier. Two blocks from the ambush site he’d flagged a cab and was headed for Mycroft’s before he thought Lestrade was even off his phone to warn the British Government he was coming over for a chat…
The back of the cab was dark and private, smelling of too many prior passengers and too little truly effective cleaning. There were traces of smoke, sweat, vomit, beer… The lights of London flashed over Sherlock’s face, and he worked to ease his temper.
He hated it—hated how hard it was to deal with people at their earthy, sexual, lusty basic level.
“Sex doesn’t alarm me,” he growled silently at the memory of his brother’s smug words during the Adler case. His eyes narrowed. Mycroft was so petty. Of course he was peeved that Sherlock teased him about his orientation—but what should he expect? The older brother, the smarter brother, but of the two of them it was Mycroft who fell into that sweaty, filthy, misleading morass of needs and hungers. Not even the ordinary variety, like John and Mary—no. Mycroft was…
He veered away from memories—Mycroft at eighteen, tangled with the neighbor’s cousin who’d come up from London for the summer. And the friend who’d driven up from uni—he and Mycroft had practically worn signs saying “Planning on a spot of sodomy late tonight.”
Sherlock had been eleven, and repelled. Not that he wasn’t repelled anyway. The kissing, the clutching, the sex stuff—he was at that bitter age when it all was appalling. But his brother, HIS big brother, was queer.
Sherlock was eleven. The year was 1987. AIDS was the gay scourge. Ass rabbits were freaks—sick, deranged freaks.
Mycroft and his lovers had strutted with a self-conscious arrogance, refusing to ignore their own nature, too terrified to actually come out, and all the while drunk on their own grubby, grunting, mind-numbing needs.
Sherlock had seen them, once—Mycroft and the uni boy. Flashes of white skin through the willows by the stream. Sounds like pigs at the trough at the local farmer’s sty—grunting, groaning, gulping. There had been a smell when the two were downwind—dark and funky and reminiscent of traces in his parent’s bedroom—a horrifying realization for Sherlock. His parents did it.
Of course they did it, he’d told himself bitterly. How else would he and Mycroft have arrived in the world. But they must not do it often—seven years lay between him and his older brother.
He could almost bear to think of Mummy and Father doing it once every seven years or so. That was at least a sign of moderation. Not like Mycroft and his friends, who drifted off too often, who rubbed together moaning…
There had been a fight. He recalled that too well—Mummy and Father in a tizzy, the uni boy turned away without warning. Mycroft had broken into Sherlock’s room—actually broken the doorframe in his rage—and shrieked into his brother’s face that he’d ruined everything.
“It was disgusting,” Sherlock had screamed back. “You’re disgusting. Pigs.” He grunted in imitation, snurfling and twitching his hips. “Animals.”
“If you don’t want to see, you shouldn’t play peeping Tom.”
“If you weren’t a gross freak it wouldn’t matter,” Sherlock had screamed, tears flowing. “It never used to matter. You used to like it when I tracked you.”
“That was different.” Mycroft shook, suddenly broken and worn out. “It was different, you nasty little tell-tale.” He slammed out of the room, ignoring the way the door flapped shut but failed to latch.
Sherlock had spent the night in his own bed, his desk chair shoved under the doorknob, waiting for his brother the Hulk to rip the door open again and kill him. He was terrified—by Mycroft’s rage, by the chaos that swept through the house when he went tattling to Mummy and Father, fully expecting them to come after Mycroft, but not on the scale they did. Not with the dismay and horror they showed. They’d tried—they’d tried to control their own reactions. That only made it worse. Sherlock knew how to see, but also how to observe. Mycroft had taught him, years since. Now, with the family in chaos, it felt like all he could do was observe—the tiny tells of his parents’ horror and guilt and despair. The deadly blend of Mycroft’s rage and self-loathing and fear. And no one, no one in the entire family knew what happened next. Did Mycroft leave? Did Mummy and Father throw their oldest son away? Did Mycroft turn on Sherlock, finally hitting him with the same fury he’d applied to Sherlock’s bedroom door? Was Mycroft still going to uni?
It had been wrong, Sherlock thought, remembering, as the London street lights passed. It always was. He understood longing. He didn’t think the better of himself for it. He spent time tossing off over pictures, movies, memories. He’d learned from Irene. He’d…played…with Janine. It never made him feel better.
John, now—you could see John felt better after a good shag, like sticking his meat in somewhere assured him he was John. He knew who he was after a fuck with a pretty bird, did John Watson. And now, with Mary, now that the tempests had died down, it was even more that way. Sex told John Watson the world was good with John, and John was good with the world.
Sherlock just felt further out of step. Yes, he got hard. Yes, he wanted to do it with pretty women. Even sometimes with men, though not so much…and the thought of being even that much like Mycroft horrified him. But even when he’d tried it, it didn’t leave him feeling secure. It just reminded him that when you got involved in that you lost all the rest of who you were.
He’d lain between Irene’s thighs, practicing the things she taught, and heard himself grunting, like a pig. After, he’d been furious, and called her “Circe.” She’d slapped him, then, saying she knew perfectly well what that insult meant, and that if he was a pig it wasn’t because she’d made him one.
They’d resolved the problem. But in the end he knew, sex stole your soul. It leached your brains. It robbed you of dignity and control.
It took more work than he’d thought to break into Mycroft’s. In the end he had to rappel in from a flat above, clinging tight to the rope he’d confiscated from a janitor’s closet. He’d slid in through the back balcony into the kitchen, and from there down the hall to the spare bedroom Mycroft used as his office. It took fifteen minutes of silent meditation, studying every detail of the lock keypad, before he’d risked tapping in a code. He’d breathed a sigh of relief. Mycroft was clever, but he shouldn’t have run Mummy’s birthday through the formula for determining the tensile strength of a steel cantilever. It took a good deal of wary deduction, but Sherlock had worked it out.
Once in he found it harder. The room smelled of Mycroft—soap and scent and brandy, the faint smell of of mentholated cigarettes, and an underlying odor that always made Sherlock think of men—and pigs.
John’s underwear had sometimes smelled that way. Sherlock sometimes smelled it on himself as he stepped into the shower—the scent hidden in the crease of his thighs, the hidden valley of his armpits. Man smell. Big brother smell. The smell of two boys fucking behind the willows by the stream, grunting and moaning and bucking. Then standing, their bits all moist and floppy and glistening in the sun before they raced shrieking into the water to wash.
“But it’s lonely,” Janine had said, well over a year after the Magnussen affair, when he’d convinced her to back him up on a case where he needed a “girlfriend” as cover. “Sex—that’s fun. Slap and tickle, have one off. Nice times. Do it, get it off your mind, move on. And meantime you’ve got someone you like to talk to.” She’d given him a meaningful glance. “Someone to brag to when it all goes right. You carry on like it’s right up there with giving yourself a lobotomy with a dull butter knife, and it’s not like that at all.”
Logically he could admit it wasn’t. Except it was—look at them all, the grunting ones. The ones obsessed with getting a leg over, with having a shag, with finding luurrv. Silly love songs. Lives wasted on what might as easily have been handled with a turkey baster and a kennel club pedigree form. It was just reproduction in the end. Why rot your mind on it when you could do without?”
He had woken Mycroft’s home laptop and tried to find a way into his accounts. Mycroft might be a freak and a pig, grunting among Circe’s sties, but he was still demonstrably the brighter brother. Sherlock kept catching a hint of a pattern, only to lose it in the swirl of possible patterns. He didn’t dare try before he was fairly sure. Mycroft would have that trust fund protected with security programs that would alert Big Brother in seconds if someone tried to hack in.
“it’s for your own protection,” Mycroft had whined when Sherlock last complained about being unable to access his own funds. “You’re still far from reliable financially, you know. And even if you were not—do you have any idea how many enemies you have?”
“Not that many who can crack a Swiss account,” Sherlock snipped back.
“It only takes one,” Mycroft had pointed out. “Or, well—more than one. I’ve broken up the amount into multiple accounts and investments. It would take a serious campaign to eliminate all your wealth. But the principle remains sound: good fences make good neighbors. Good security makes good sense.”
“That’s idiotic,” Sherlock said. “You talk about enemies and hackers—and then you start spouting off about turning them into good neighbors. It’s bollocks, that’s what it is. You never did want me to grow up and have control, did you?”
Which had started another fight and left them unable to talk to each other for six months after.
Out in the flat something stirred, clicked, and opened, and then the voices came. Mycroft, chattering softly about something, and a deeper voice chiming in behind. Verse and response in some low-key plainsong recitation of psalms…
“It was a good job,” Mycroft said.
“Damn right…”
Lestrade—that was Lestrade’s voice. Mycroft had invited Lestrade over after they’d met in the Westminster office? Since when did Mycroft invite his minions home?
And how was Sherlock going to escape this flat with both of them there?
He reviewed the floor plan. The only exits this far back in the flat were straight multi-story drops, too like the leap from Barts, but with no inflatable cushion and no little mob of merry henchmen on hand to help him out. The other ways out were back up the rope to the flat above, and out the front door—and both routes were visible from anywhere in the front of the flat. Sherlock wouldn’t be able to sneak past so long as Mycroft and Lestrade were there.
If he waited for Lestrade to go? That was bad, too, though—the odds of Mycroft coming directly back to the office to lock up his work laptop and secure his private papers were too high.
He eased himself up, closing down the laptop, scowling at the thought of so much effort wasted with nothing to show for it.
In the front rooms he could hear the two men talking still—steady, conversational…
Entirely unlike Mycroft. Mycroft the recluse. Mycroft who’d had few, if any private associates since that summer back from uni, with the neighbor’s relation and the friend from his college. Since the fight, and the anger, and the door burst open, and Mummy and Father in hysterics…
Mycroft didn’t do people. If Sherlock sometimes felt a pang of accountability for his brother’s solitude—and he did, on occasion, feel guilt—he also thought it a better life than Mycroft had seemed set to live before it all went pear-shaped.
He imagined it as a life of debauch and degradation, though he’d never admit as much. Big brother a slave to his pecker, lost to all reason and logic, sweating and grunting beneath men unworthy of asking him the time of day. If part of him felt guilt, another part felt an angry sense of being unappreciated: he’d rescued Mycroft! Saved him from his own baser instincts…
Verse and response; verse and response. Two male voices rising and falling, offering a line, murmuring back a reply. He could hear the refrigerator door open and shut, and the faint rattle and chink of glass bottles tapping together.
Beer. Big pint bottles of beer.
He recalled a time sharing beer with John, beer cold from the refrigerator. It had been a hot day, and a hard case, and John had popped the caps off with a manic joy, and downed the first bottle almost in one long gulp. Then he’d retrieved another bottle and settled at the kitchen table, and the two had discussed the events, reviewed their victory. Sherlock could recall the cold beer flowing down his throat, and the bitter taste and floral note of hops. They’d laughed.
It wasn’t sexual—but it was something as intimate and intense.
He frowned.
Celibacy, that was the thing. In celibacy he could have his beer. Enjoy John and Mary. Laugh on a hillside in Sussex beside Janine, arguing about the worth of bees and the care of hives.
Celibacy gave him cold beer and the hunt. It gave him peers who understood his nature. It brought him sweet Molly and Billy Wiggins and Mrs. Hudson. It kept him right.
Like John kept him right. He could cling to celibacy.
He thought about it.
Sex didn’t alarm him. No—it was what it was, all the sweat and grunting and ill-advised choices and obsessive behaviors and broken hearts and the dangle and dance of his own brother’s balls as two men ran in the meadow by the stream. It was what it was—and what it was unmanned Sherlock, stole his human excellence. Celibacy, though…
It kept him right.
The front rooms had fallen silent as he thought. He wondered fretfully if the two men were still there, or if Lestrade had left and Mycroft slipped to bed after all while Sherlock pondered and contemplated.
There was no sound.
He had to get out. The rope up to the next flat or the door out of this one—either would do, but he had to escape. Now Mycroft was home Sherlock dared not stay. Mycroft would be so angry—so very angry.
They’d never trusted each other the same way since that summer. Later events had made it all worse, but that was the year when everything changed.
He eased the door of the office open and listened again. No sound. He crept down the hall, easing the door shut behind him. One step. Another step…
They were picked out in high relief by the light from the balcony window. Two men, already half-dressed—or half-undressed. They hadn’t got far, he supposed. Not to the grunting and shoving. Not to the smells and the embarrassment. Not to naked bits slick and shiny, or to the bit where Sherlock would have no choice but to understand his big brother lay under Lestrade’s body, open to Lestrade’s cock, moaning for Lestrade’s touch. Not that far.
Instead they were wrapped, one around the other, the ivy and the rose, twining, twining, sighing. White shoulders in cool city light. Tender hands gliding.
He’d seen it with John and Mary. He’d done it himself—obeyed Irene’s suggestions, learned how to make her sigh. He’d made Janine sigh and moan and grunt for him. He knew the dance and how it ended.
He felt the panic in his gorge…the old fear from the day of the boys by the willows, the boys by the stream. Circe’s boys grunting and snurfling at each other like pigs.
He must have made a sound—Mycroft looked up, face rising from his lover’s shoulder. Lestrade, alerted, turned, craning his neck.
No one said anything.
Sherlock’s heart pounded in his chest.
Mycroft said, softly, “I do hope you’re not planning on telling Mummy. It’s late days for that, now.”
“I didn’t…I didn’t mean…” Sherlock didn’t know if he meant he hadn’t meant it now—or then. “I didn’t expect…”
Mycroft’s eyes blinked closed, cold and pale and reptilian, like a turtle meditating. He nodded, silently. “You’ll be wanting to go home to Baker Street?”
Sherlock nodded, unable to marshal his words.
Mycroft nodded back. He dropped a kiss on Lestrade’s shoulder, then stepped away, ushering his baby brother to the door. He opened it wide.
Sherlock walked gingerly across the sitting room, unable to meet Lestrade’s gaze.
He and Mycroft looked at each other.
“I really didn’t mean to,” Sherlock said.
Mycroft gave a wry smile. “I know. And I didn’t mean to alarm you.” He waited until Sherlock stepped out, and closed the door softly behind him.
It was done. Sherlock stood in the corridor outside Mycroft’s door.
He’d broken in, gone where he was not invited, prowled in his brother’s private spaces, tracking him through his private labyrinths—and once more he’d learned what he never wanted to learn, and come away with nothing but regret.
Celibacy, he thought, alone and shaken. It keeps me right. And clinging to that he left, determined to forget the grace and the tenderness, the delicate intimacy, the secret garden that held his beloved brother and his oldest friend and mentor in seclusion, far, far away from him.
Celibacy kept him right.
Why, though, was “right” always so alone?