Archive of Our Own ^beta

Mycroft was aware enough to know, even asleep, that he was dreaming. The world around him was lit in soft focus and a soft wind blew from nowhere. The crying baby, he knew, was Sherlock. He remembered the sound from ages ago, from when his baby brother was still actually a baby and had spent two whole weeks screaming at the top of his tiny lungs as if someone were holding a hot poker to his skin.

He stepped closer to the bed, laid in a room of marble, on which a woman struggled to push a life from her womb.

“Mother,” Mycroft murmured.

Be instinctually moved to help, and blood gushed from between her legs as Sherlock’s cries crescendoed into frantic screeches.

+

He woke in an instant, never having been a deep sleeper, to find his phone buzzing beside the bed hard enough to walk itself across the nightstand. It was Sherlock, of course. It was always Sherlock.

+

Except for the bedroom, the flat was as it ever was. Sherlock’s chaos tempered by Dr. Watson’s tidy nature. Lestrade gave the elder Holmes a short nod and, in a wise move, silently kept out of his way. Watson, however, dogged his steps to Sherlock’s room with a tenacity that Mycroft might have approved of any other time. Now, it just annoyed him, caused ripples in the pattern he was trying to pick from the bloodstains on the sheets.

Anthea had given him the Yard’s files before he’d finished getting dressed, all the information that Sherlock had been chasing. There wasn’t much of interest, just death. He saw death every day. Not personally. God, no. Mycroft Holmes wasn’t built for leg work.

This wasn’t death, this was an absence.

+

Sherlock had never been able to resist a good puzzle. The box now in Mycroft’s possession, combined with the locked-room mysteries, would have been like catnip. Mycroft, however, was able to ignore the lure set before him. He stared at the spot on his desk where it sat like a poisonous spider, harmless until you started poking it.

The woman his men dragged inside reared back at the sight. “Where the hell did you get that?”

Mycroft waved at the chair in front of his desk. “Please sit, Ms. Summerskill.”

“Do you have any idea how dangerous that thing is?”

“No.” He decided not to mention the Channard files his American contact managed to uncover. “Why don’t you tell me?”

+

The cigarette between her fingers shook with the tremor of her hand as she spoke of demons. The stuff of fantasy, of nightmares, really, but Mycroft let her talk.

“You should’ve left the damn thing where you found it. It’s cursed.”

Mycroft sneered lightly. “Fairy tales and urban legends.”

“Yeah?” Joey gave her cigarette a dirty look and snubbed it out in the ashtray Mycroft passed her. “Well, those ‘fairy tales and urban legends’ killed my friends. And turned them into...things. Monsters.”

“And my brother? Do you think he could be one of these...monsters?”

Joey snorted. “You’d better hope he’s dead. God help him if he’s not.”

+

At first, Mycroft called Dr. Watson compulsively. He could almost hear his brother’s voice in his head, asking if John was alright, if he was working, eating, sleeping. Did John miss him? A month in, new information started to come from France about dark magic and satanic rites enacted centuries ago. He had to dig further, go farther.

+

Sherlock’s voice echoed in the cold darkness as Mycroft wandered through a maze which echoed the soft cadence of Sherlock’s voice, and each bloodstain on the stone walls told a story of death. Sherlock continued to mutter randomness. Only one phrase, stuck on repeat, mattered.

Aide-moi.

+

Anthea traveled beside him the whole way, across the continents, into sketchy dens filled with drugs and dark magic, all without lifting her eyes from her ever present smartphone. She charted planes, delayed meetings, and ran interference, all so Mycroft could travel the world in search of more information. He didn’t ask her to open the box. She demanded to be the one.

“My dear...” Mycroft swallowed, his throat oddly tight. “You deserve a raise.”

Anthea gave him a level look. “The car is en route and should arrive in ten minutes.” Then she turned, sat on the floor, and waited for the signal to begin.

+

The most frightening thing about the creatures that appeared was the blankness which clung to them. Mycroft could read only one tell, that of pain. His eye was drawn not to the obvious leader of the group but to one of the others lingering in the background.

Sherlock.

All that brilliance was buried under a newer kind of pain than the others. His neck, strangely elongated, bled freely the thick metal rings wrapped around it, and his eyes...Mycroft struggled to keep his own open, to not close them in despair.

Sherlock’s eyes were gone.

+

“He bit me!” One of the men yelled. He jerked away, clutching at his bleeding arm. Sherlock hissed-actually hissed!-then suddenly went limp as the doctor (not John) managed to get a syringe into a flailing thigh.

“Jesus,” John said. “Sherlock.” He stumbled after the men carting Sherlock off. Mycroft made a note to make sure the man got his own wound tended to. It wouldn’t do to have it fester.

Mycroft looked down to where a shell-shocked Anthea still sat. He helped her up off the floor but his own knees gave out beneath him. Anthea managed to prop him up against her and steered the both of them towards the door.

“Sir,” she muttered, “about that raise...”

+

Despite all of John’s threats and pleading, he wasn’t aloud to follow Sherlock through the double doors.

“You might as well sit down. I imagine he’ll be a while.” Mycroft gingerly took a seat in one of the grimy plastic chairs in the waiting room.

John dropped into the seat next to him and ran a hand over his face. The cut on his cheek had dried over to a crusted red line. The damage hadn’t been as bad as Mycroft feared-just a scratch, really. They sat together for hours, waiting silently, until the doctor finally appeared.

+

The list of injuries was long: contusions, open wounds, misplaced organs...his eyes. And his neck.

“I’m sorry,” the doctor said to Mycroft, John hovering beside him. “There’s not much else we can do for his neck here. The extent of damage-“

“Can’t you just remove them?” John asked. “ They do that with those girls in, what, Africa? And they’re fine, afterwards. Just fine.”
.
The doctor stiffened and shot John a dirty look. “Those women have had years to get their bodies to look that way. Besides, this isn’t the same.”

“The hell it’s not.” John pointed at the bed. “Look at him!”

“Doctors,” Mycroft said in an attempt to defuse the situation. “Can we please stay on track?”

“As I was saying...the women you’re thinking of don’t actually have longer necks. It’s an illusion created by the slow compression of the collar bone. Young Mr. Holmes’s neck has actually been stretched and his throat partially crushed. There’s likely to be muscle damage as well. Besides, those rings have no visible locking mechanism. We don’t know how to get them off without causing further harm.”

John went to take Sherlock’s hand but paused. “What about his hands?”

“We’ll save as much as we can, of course, but he’ll lose his fingers to the second knuckle.”

Mycroft gave the doctor his best imperious look, one that would quell the hardest of dictators. “Fix what you can.” He and Dr. Watson would handle the rest.

+

Sherlock woke three days later, then had to be sedated when he tried to cut and bite the nurses attending to him. After that little display of savagery, Mycroft shooed all the other doctors out and stood sentry outside the door while John sat by Sherlock’ bedside for another few days.

He kept a hand on Sherlock’s arm, as his hands were now mittened with bandages from a second surgery. He withdrew when Sherlock began to show the first signs of consciousness.

“Sherlock?” he said as softly as he could.

Sherlock sighed, then licked his dry lips. John picked up the glass from the little table by the bed and brought the straw to Sherlock’s lips. After the first sip, Sherlock tried to gulp water down at such an alarming rate that John had to pull the cup away. The straw remained in Sherlock’s mouth a few seconds longer, until Sherlock finally gave up and let it drop out of his mouth.

“Careful,” John murmured. “We don’t want to make you sick.”

Sherlock’s head turned towards him. John leaned towards him when he said, “John...John.”

When John placed a hand on his arm, Sherlock jerked forward and snapped his teeth. If John hadn’t such quick reflexes, he would lost a chunk of skin off his face. Sherlock laughed, the first sound, besides John’s name, that he’d made since they’d rescued him. It was loud, wild, and totally deranged.

Watching from the small window set in the door, Mycroft sighed. He waited until John finally left, then entered the room. Sherlock lay awake in the bed. If his eyes hadn’t been covered-if he’d had eyes, at all-he would most likely have rolled them at the look of sorrow on his brother’s face.

Mycroft said nothing, just reached out and set a familiar box on Sherlock’s chest, then undid the restraints so that Sherlock could feel his way to it with the reduced length of his hands. The next sound to come out of Sherlock’s mouth was a scream of pure terror, nothing left of the manic humor from earlier. The box went flying across the room and bounced off the opposite wall.

The sight of Sherlock’s panic, while chilling to watch, hinted at something more. Somewhere inside the twisted remains of torture and inhumanity, the great Sherlock Holmes lay waiting.