New Fic: A Study in Doubles 11/?
Title: A Study in Doubles
Author: jupiter_ash
Rating: NC17
Beta: trillsabells
Word Count: 7K this part. 74k+ so far and (still) growing.
Pairings: Sherlock/John
Disclaimer: Sherlock Holmes created by ACD, Sherlock owned by Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss.
Summary: Sequel to A Study in Winning. Because winning Wimbledon is one thing, maintaining a relationship is something else entirely.
Warnings: Graphic sex, swearing, French.
Spoilers: Some for S2; mainly throwaway lines and some character appearances. No spoilers for S2 episode plots.
*
A Study in Doubles
Part Eleven
*
“It wasn’t just the doubles, was it?”
He had no idea how long they had been simply lying there for. It might have been ten minutes or an hour since he had left the bed and his partner’s embrace only long enough for a trip to the bathroom and the retrieval of a damp towel. The clean-up had been gentle but perfunctory, Sherlock’s eyes never leaving him until the towel was tossed away and they were once more on the bed.
The anger of the argument and the passion of their coupling had given away to a feeling akin to mild awkwardness as if neither of them were sure as to what was supposed to happen next. They may have finally gotten onto the same page in terms of their emotions and views on their relationship, and they might have affirmed it with heart stopping sex, but that didn’t mean that everything was now okay. In fact, John was pretty sure that a number of issues hadn’t been covered, but the most pressing was the question of what they were now supposed to do. How do you follow all of that raw emotion up?
By taking another risk, he realised, and opening his arms, motioned for Sherlock to move into them. There was barely a moment of hesitation before Sherlock was curling up next to him, their bodies once more entwining. Funny, he had never really taken Sherlock to be a snuggler, but right now there was no other word for it. Head tucked under his arm, ear pressed to his chest, legs entangling with his, there was nothing else it could be. Apparently snuggling was something that Sherlock did and that was more than fine. It just suggested that there were a lot of other things he might not yet know about his lover, or been mistaken about, which was when it finally dawned on him. Of course it hadn’t just been the doubles.
At the question, Sherlock shifted slightly, the arm slung around his waist tightening instinctively, but he didn’t deny it. The doubles had only been a part of it. That didn’t surprise him. Now that he knew the truth about Sherlock’s motivations it had thrown a completely different light on so many things to the point where he wondered how he had never noticed before.
“You’ve been trying to give me reasons to stay, haven’t you?” he continued, making sure that his arm held Sherlock tightly to him in turn. The last thing he wanted was for Sherlock to take the conversation as some kind of rejection. “The meals out, the clothes, the tourist holiday in LA.” The bike ride, the famous friends, the gorgeous suites, trying to treat him, trying to pay, watching films Sherlock knew he liked, the massages, the hand job. Oh god, he really was an idiot, wasn’t he? How had he missed it all? How?
“It seemed prudent to encourage your interest in my companionship,” Sherlock mumbled, staring off into the distance. “I was assured that that was how a relationship worked.”
“Oh? Assured by whom?”
He really hoped the answer wasn’t TV programmes, films or magazines.
“By anyone who cared to voice an opinion. My brother explicitly informed me not to screw it up.”
“Your brother?”
“Lestrade told me to try and be less of an arse than usual.”
“Lestrade said that?”
“Mrs Hudson said not to take you for granted and that doing thoughtful things for the other person was what kept a relationship alive, although she did get vague in regards to what thoughtful things I should do. Flowers in your case seemed pointless, meals out ended with disagreements over who picked up the bill, and new clothing, that you would never otherwise treat yourself to, weren’t received as well as I had hope.”
Oh god.
“Irene said I should trust you more, that you were clearly crazy enough to put up with me, but there is always a limit to a person’s interest, affection and ability to ‘put up with me’. You are a number of surprising things, John, but you are not a mere spectator.”
No, he wasn’t.
He closed his eyes, a flash of emotional pain shooting through him, not because Sherlock was wrong, but because deep down he knew that Sherlock was right. He wasn’t just a mere spectator, he never had been. He needed to be part of something, to be involved, he couldn’t just watch as it happened around him.
“I’m sorry,” he said. For not noticing, for reacting badly to the tokens of affection, for not being capable of just sitting and watching like all the other partners of tennis players.
“Don’t be,” Sherlock said. “I have no interest in changing you or in you being anything other than yourself.”
From Sherlock that was akin to a declaration of the highest order.
“Likewise,” he said, bending his head to press a kiss to the thick curls. “You don’t have to keep trying so hard to keep me. And while, yeah, doing, how did Mrs Hudson put it, oh yeah, thoughtful things. And while doing thoughtful things is very much appreciated, I really don’t want you practically killing yourself for them. I really don’t like to see you exhausted, or in pain, or on the edge of some sort of breakdown, especially if I’m the cause. Alright?”
“Noted.”
“Good. It’s not going to work though,” he added after a moment, stroking his fingers through the soft curls of Sherlock’s hair. “This plan of yours, which you should have talked to me about first incidentally. You can’t keep playing both the singles and the doubles. It’s too much.” And he was not about to let Sherlock throw away his singles career for him.
“I know.”
Sherlock’s voice was quiet and just a little bit broken. The arm across his chest pulled them closer together, Sherlock’s head slipping down to pressed against his stomach. The action said everything. ‘I know, but I don’t want to let you go’.
“It’s okay,” he whispered. “We’ll come up with something.”
They lay like that in silence, holding each other, neither willing to let go. He still had a lot of questions, about Moriarty, about the past, but he didn’t want to ask, didn’t want to give Sherlock a reason to pull away. They had come so far, after all. Further in the past few hours than in the past few months combined. He could now allow himself to see their possible future, beyond the immediate forthcoming months, beyond the end of the season and into the New Year and further still. He wasn’t about to allow their past to upset their future, and god knows, he had his own history, his own problems, his own issues. Oh yes, he did.
“I have trust issues,” he said, the words leaving his mouth before he could censor them. He gave a very small laugh. “Or at least that’s what my therapist claimed. Was never sure if I should believe her, which I suppose just proves the point.”
Trust issues was just the beginning of what had been said during some of his sessions. After Mary, after the accident, after his career had come to a screaming halt and he had been lost and in pain he had spent many hours with his therapist, some hours more productive than others. It had helped, a bit, until he had ended it and decided to grit his teeth and continue on his own.
“Mary always claimed I had commitment issues as well. I know I’ve got impulse control problems. Gambling was my worse. Poker, strip poker, fine, just don’t let me near anything to do with money. I’ve wasted more than enough over the years.”
What else was there?
“I have a temper, but you know that by now. You’re only my third relationship. The other two were with women. Sarah and I broke up because I didn’t love her. Mary and I, well, I used the words but they were without meaning. Empty, she called them. Worthless. After that I vowed never to do that again, to use the words when I didn’t mean them, so you can guess what happened with Sarah.”
They fell back into silence, Sherlock’s breath puffing against the soft skin on his tummy, his leg lifting to slip further over.
“You scare me.”
He really hadn’t planned to say that.
“Not you,” he quickly amended as he felt Sherlock tighten against him. “More, what you make me feel. I never thought I would… well, you’re different. Different from anyone else I’ve ever been with, and not just because you’re a man, because well, we’ve already covered that I suppose, but because you just are. I don’t want to lose you. You’re the first person I’ve ever felt that for. I just thought you should know. This is new for me too.”
They fell back into silence.
“Is this where I’m supposed to tell you about my past?”
John blinked for a moment, noted the words, ran them back through his mind and then through his unofficial Sherlock Holmes translator. Ah, a little vulnerability, a little awkwardness, a noticeable amount of uncertainty. Not something to be offended at.
“Only if you want to,” he said lightly.
“But you want to know.”
He pulled a slight face and guessed that Sherlock would be able to tell it was there even without looking so there wasn’t any point in pretending otherwise. “I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t curious,” he admitted, “But this isn’t some quid pro quo. I’m not going to push you. You’ll tell me when you’re ready, even if it’s twenty years from now.”
He loosened his grasp as Sherlock pulled up, a touch of a frown on his face as he propped himself up, pale eyes looking into his intensely.
“You sound so sure,” Sherlock said after the moment.
“That you’ll tell me or that we’ll still be together in twenty years from now?” he asked carefully.
“Both.”
He gave a small shrug. “Maybe it’s because I am.”
“Why?”
“Because I hope that one day you’ll believe me when I say I’m not going to leave you and nothing you tell me about your past will change that.”
There was another pause, Sherlock’s eyes searching his deeply as if looking for something. He must have found it or been satisfied as after a moment he pressed forward, pushing their lips together in a warm kiss before sliding down to settle back where they had been, ear to his chest.
“You’ve read my Wikipedia page.”
It was a statement, not a question, and while he had been hoping that Sherlock might finally trust him enough to unburden his past, he hadn’t been totally expecting it.
“Yes,” he said.
“You know how I was raised.”
He nodded slightly. “In France, by your grandmother. Your mother’s mother,” he clarified. “She’s the one who encouraged your tennis. She paid for your training.”
“She did.” There was another pause. “It wasn’t always like that though.”
There was another pause, a long one, long enough that he wondered if that was all he would be getting. It was, after all, something. Not what he had been expecting, but something none the less. He knew that Sherlock had been born in England, that his father was English, but he hadn’t really thought that there must have been a story behind Sherlock’s upbringing in France. Part of him had just presumed that it had been down to the tennis. The French grassroots system for tennis was far superior to the British version. It was no accident that there were far more top class French tennis players than British ones. Wikipedia hadn’t said much. The rest of Sherlock’s background, he realised, was a mystery.
Would he find out now? He kept his silence, waited, and then Sherlock started to speak, distantly and somewhat detached.
“My father died when I was four. Heart attack. One moment he was there, the next he was a stranger in a casket. That was when everything changed.”
Sherlock shifted slightly but didn’t move away.
“Maman was never the same after that. Something died with him. She was like a shadow, a wraith. You could say I lost two parents that day.”
Oh god. He ‘knew’ that Sherlock’s parents weren’t around, but it sounded different when it came from Sherlock’s lips. More real somehow.
“They met in 1973,” Sherlock continued, “at Place de la Sorbonne, in Paris. He was in Paris to confer with a renowned colleague and lecturer over some scientific research. She was an art student with an interest in architecture, music and poetry, taking photos for a project. They bumped into each other, quite literally I’m assured, the immediate outcome of which involved a spilt coffee and a ruined bl`ouse. I’m also assured that somewhere between the acute mortification and extensive apologies, it was love at first sight. Certainly they married two years later. He was thirty-seven, she just twenty-two.”
Thirty-seven and twenty-two? And to think he had been concerned about the six years between him and Sherlock.
“Despite the considerable age gap, neither family upheld any meaningful objection. My father was the grandson of a Baron on his mother’s side, country squires on his father’s. His interests had always lain with the academic and research over romance and women. I do believe the family had at some point thought him to be the ‘other way inclined’ and were satisfied with his discretion and apparent lack of interest in pursuing anyone they would have cause to disapprove of. Eccentricity runs in the family, as does homosexual tendencies. It’s rarely spoken of, but my father’s great uncle, after whom I was named, spent his retirement years in Sussex with his bees and widower doctor friend of his. No-one in the family questioned it. I’m sure they would barely raise an eyebrow at us.”
Sherlock’s lips curved into a smile, which John felt pressed to the skin on his side. He brushed his fingers through Sherlock’s curls in response but didn’t interrupt.
“My mother was what you might call a free spirit, hardly surprising in a family who had produced a number of world renowned painters and less known musicians, sculptors and dancers. She was beautiful, alive. So alive. She was also the youngest, the fey child, always happy, always dancing, never a care in the world. The others doted on her, spoilt her to some extent, sheltered her from the cruelness of life. Art was her love and she could see beauty in anything. In the falling of a leaf, in the crack in a paving stone, in the ringing of raindrops on a metal roof. Somehow she saw it in my father, a pale, withdrawn, studious man, awkward in his British reserve, hiding away from the world with his books and his research. For my mother, marrying for love to an eccentric English scientist fifteen years her senior was both the most traditional and the most bohemian thing she would ever do.
“His work was in England, so that was where she joined him. He worked, she sung. She used to sing a lot. A la claire fontaine. M’en allant promener. J’ai trouvé l’eau si belle. Que je m’y suis baignée. Il y a longtemps que je t’aime. Jamais je ne t’oublierai ! That was her song, or at least one of them. I’ve never been able to hear it since without remembering her, the way she would dance around while singing it. The grace of a willow in a gentle breeze.”
His voice trailed off for a moment, but only for a moment and then he was back, the words crisp and precise again.
“Mycroft was born three years after they married. Father was forty. I don’t think he’d ever really considered children before that. It all came as rather a surprise. Nine months might be enough to come to terms with the idea, but the reality-” His lips twitched. “There’s this picture of him, a chubby dark haired infant in his arms and he’s looking down with an expression you can only describe as a mixture of amazement, horror and astonishment. Stunned but proud. Children were something that other people had, but there he was. Forty years old, revered academically, financially secure, beautiful wife and now a son.
“Seven years later I was born. Maman had wanted a second child. She was still young after all and father had no objections. I honestly think he would have given her anything she asked for if it had been within his power. Another baby was nothing.
“Four years after that Father was gone. They had only fourteen years of marriage, sixteen together in total. Till death do us part. A lifetime, it seems, is not nearly as long as you think it’s going to be.”
He paused for a moment and John could feel the hand curved around his side pressing just that little bit closer, as if by holding on tighter Sherlock could stop anything from happening to him. He tightened his own arm around Sherlock, equally not wanting to let him go.
“I have very few memories of father,” Sherlock continued after a moment. “I know Mycroft resembles him far more than I do, more so if you imagine Mycroft with fairer, redder hair, a beard and glasses. I remember he used to laugh when he tossed me into the air and he smelt of old books. Mycroft remembers more of course but he’s not inclined to share. He and father were much alike, in looks and in temperament. I’m far more like Maman’s family.
“I do remember the casket though. A smooth, polished mahogany with a high gloss finish, white velvet interior and gleaming metal handles. The man inside it was not father though, it was a pale stranger who resembled father in the basic features but that was it. I remember black suits, the pungent smell of lilies, and having to be quiet. I remember Grand-mere being there and hushed words spoken in French too fast for me to understand. And I remember Maman crying. Always crying. Even when she was pretending not to be. She was just thirty-five, far too young to be a widow with two young boys. She tried her best though, she kept her composure during the funeral, the dutiful English widow, beautiful but stoic, but afterwards everything just stopped. She stopped singing, she stopped dancing and she was always crying. ‘Pourquoi pleures-tu?’ I remember asking her. Why are you crying?”
“You can probably guess the next part. With Father gone we had no reason to stay in England, so Maman accepted Grand-mere’s offer to return to the big house in Dordogne. Being young and naïve I initially thought it to be temporary, like the summers we had spent there, but at some point I must have realised that we weren’t returning to England. So I lost my father, my home, my friends and Maman just kept crying. Then Mycroft left for boarding school and other than screaming and howling, I didn’t speak for months. At her wits end, Grand-mere marched me down to the tennis court, handed me a racket and told me to take my anger and frustration out on the balls. She threw them, I hit them. She threw them harder, I hit them harder. She threw them faster, then she got my cousin to throw them. After I hit him with a number of returns they realised I had a natural talent. Grand-mere then brought in a tennis trainer who confirmed that I had real potential and as to the sport, the rest is history.”
It was, and a history that John had practically memorised. Junior French Open champion aged sixteen. Junior Australian and Wimbledon finalist. Professional at seventeen. Top twenty by twenty-one. Top ten by twenty-two. Top five a year later and now ranked third with numerous titles to his name, but still chasing that illusive Grand Slam.
“It probably won’t surprise you that I was home schooled.”
He smiled slightly. Sherlock was right, that didn’t surprise him.
“They brought in tutors, nearly a dozen in the end, teaching in both French and English. Maman was insistent that we retained our English without accent and with a wide vocabulary, just as she had insisted the same for our French while we had been in England. Seven years my senior, Mycroft was already fluent in English, French, German and Spanish, with groundings in Ancient Greek and Latin. I saw very little of him once he went away. It was his choice to board and Grand-mere gave him the choice of any exclusive boarding school in Europe. He chose Schule Schloss Salem in Germany. I’ve always thought it was his way of coping, a fresh start in a country that held no memories for him. I, on the other hand, was stuck at the house watching as Maman sank further and further down. There were days when she didn’t leave her bed. Weeks when she barely left her room. Some days she was almost back to normal, and those were the hardest, because they never lasted. Inevitably I would do something or say something and then the tears would start again and Grand-mere would bustle me away, back to my bedroom, or down to the tennis court, telling me that it wasn’t my fault, but I knew it was. Of course it was. If only I learnt what to avoid, then she wouldn’t breakdown again.”
Oh god.
“I even made tables, charts, spider diagrams, trying to find the pattern, but I never did solve it.”
Because there was nothing to solve, John thought, his heart aching as he pictured a young Sherlock trying to make sense of his mother’s depression and heartbreak. It explained so much, including why he didn’t let people close to him.
“What happened?” he asked gently after Sherlock had lapsed into silence. He had a feeling the ending wasn’t going to be particularly happy. But then again, he’d read the Wikipedia page.
“She died, just before I turned eight.”
Christ.
“The official ruling was death by misadventure. I’ve never been certain. She had been on so many drugs, to help her sleep, to hold back her depression, for her migraines, that it could well have been a tragic accident.”
Or it could have been on purpose.
“Either way, like father she too was suddenly gone.”
John tightened his arm around Sherlock’s shoulder. “I’m sorry.”
“Yes, well, simple fact of life, that’s what Mycroft told me years later. All lives end. All hearts are broken. Caring is not an advantage. Caring is what killed her.”
No wonder Sherlock had issues.
“I threw myself into my tennis then, kept my loneliness and anger at bay by spending every free moment hitting balls back over a net. It was my main escape, although it wasn’t long before I started to physically escape as well, first on foot, then on Mycroft’s moped. I would disappear for hours. The moped was exhilarating. It made me feel something when nothing else did. Grand-mere knew exactly what I was doing, but she didn’t stop me. She knew I had to work out my grief in my own way.
“Then Mycroft came back. I was fourteen. It had been years since I’d spent any substantial time with him. The boy I remembered had turned into a man. He had a degree from Oxford under his belt, the same college as Father had been to. He had job offers from both the French and the British governments. With his sharp mind and his languages he could have gone into the foreign office, become a diplomat or an ambassador, a civil servant at least. He could have gone into research like Father, run a company, become a consultant of some sort, but he didn’t. He just asked me if I was serious about the tennis and when I said yes he took over the role of my guardianship and we toured Europe on the junior circuit. He could have run a country, but instead he structured his life around me. ‘You’re all I have left’, he said. You have no idea how much I’ve hated him for that.
“With single-mindedness and perseverance I rose through the junior ranks. Most of that you know of course. I turned professional just after my seventeenth birthday. Mycroft said I was being rash. I didn’t listen of course. Then came the incident with Moriarty. What you won’t know is what happened eighteen months later.”
For a moment there was a pause and then Sherlock was pulling away. Startled, John propped himself up as Sherlock settled on the edge of the bed, the broad, smooth curve of his back facing him. The relief that Sherlock hadn’t fully run away was tempered by the fact he had moved to physically put distance between them. Was it that bad, he wondered, that even now he felt the need for distance?
“Sherlock?”
“I wasn’t injured.” The words cut through the silence. “I know what my Wikipedia page says, I wrote it, but it’s a lie. That’s the official story, but there was no injury when I was nineteen, at least no physical one.”
Oh, right. John frowned slightly as he tried to remember what he had read. Even Wikipedia had been vague, but there was no doubt that Sherlock had been absent from the tennis scene for the best part of a year.
“Grand-mere died.”
Oh.
“Cancer got her in the end,” Sherlock continued. He then gave a brief bark of a laugh. “Well, nothing else was going to take her down, not the woman who had been born in the middle of one war, survived the flu epidemic that claimed her mother and two brothers, lived through the Nazi occupation of another war, lost one child to cot death and later a husband to pneumonia, raised three children and various grandchildren and refused to be defeated. She was the strongest person I knew and I thought she would be there forever. Turns out I was wrong.” He pressed his lips together, his shoulders slumping slightly.
Reaching out, John hesitated before pressing a hand to the shoulder. “Sherlock.”
“I’m fine,” Sherlock said but didn’t move to avoid the hand. Taking that as a good thing, John shifted so they were a little closer and let the hand slip down Sherlock’s arm until their fingers entwined and Sherlock returned to staring in front.
“For me it was sudden. For everyone else, well, let’s say they had plenty of time. Do you have any idea what it’s like to know that everyone else knew? That you were the last because they didn’t bother telling you?” He turned his head and John could see the hurt he obviously still felt. “My own brother didn’t even tell me. You should have heard my language. Grand-mere would have been appalled, but it boiled down to the fact he should have told me. Someone should have told me.”
Yes, it sounded like someone should have done.
“Why didn’t they?” he asked.
“They claimed they thought it would distract me. Apparently they hadn’t wanted me to lose focus.”
“They were trying to protect you.”
“As if I were a child. As if she was just my Grandmother and nothing else. I knew far more about death and loss than they did, I was far closer to her than Mycroft was, and by the time I got there I barely had time to say goodbye. The woman who had raised me since I was seven, the only constant in my life since I had been four, the first person to put a racket in my hand and see my potential, who had paid for the lessons and training, who had had the court at the house specially re-laid to the highest standard, who had always believed in me and pushed me to be better, lay sick and dying and no one had breathed a fucking word.”
He sucked in a deep breath, dropping his chin to his chest as his fingers tightened around the bed sheets and around John’s hand.
“Sorry,” he whispered.
“Don’t be,” John said back firmly and scooted up closer behind his lover, wrapping his free arm around him and dropping a kiss onto his shoulder. “Don’t ever be sorry about this. You’re entitled to be angry. God, I would be angry too. Don’t think it makes you any less, alright?”
There was a faint nod and just as John was wondering if he should stay like that or move back, Sherlock’s hand caught his, their fingers entwining.
“I was on tour when they finally told me. It was Joseph, who did it. My cousin. Well, one of them. The same one I had hit the balls at all those years before. He grabbed the phone and blurted it out before anyone could stop him. ‘Grand-mere’s dying’ he said. ‘Elle est en train de mourir du cancer’. She’s dying of cancer. Come home before it’s too late. I was on the next flight available. I’m not even sure what I told the tournament organisers. Injury, family emergency, didn’t matter. I pulled out and went. Longest flight of my life. By the time I got there, well, her time left was measured in days, not weeks, and then she was gone. Like Father, like Maman. Gone.
“By law the house was split between the children, Maman’s share coming to Mycroft and me. Those who didn’t want it, Mycroft and I bought out their parts. Father’s inheritance had been generous and I had money by then, even if Mycroft controlled most of it. Joseph and his family live in the main house now. It’s good. The house needs a family. Mycroft and I have our own parts as well. I’ll take you there.” Their eyes met as Sherlock turned his head. “You can see where I grew up, meet Joseph. You’ll like him I think.”
He could see a touch of hesitation in Sherlock’s eyes. Unnecessary of course.
“I’d like that,” he said offering a small smile.
Sherlock nodded, briefly squeezing his hand and turning away again.
“Then there was the funeral. Well, it was a funeral. Another funeral. We buried her next to Grand-pere. Everyone came. Everyone. There were so many people. They kept coming. Kept bringing flowers. Kept repeating how sorry they were for our loss. I was supposed to stay and nod and be the dutiful grandson but I just wanted to get out of there. Then it got worse, because afterwards they all wanted to talk to me again. Not about Grand-mere though. No, they wanted to talk about the tennis. How are you doing? Oh we’re so proud of you. We saw you on telly. You’re so good. When are you going to win something important? It was hideous. Hateful. It was all I could do not to tell them what I really thought, but that would have caused a scene and the rest of the family would have been upset. I don’t think Grand-mere would have minded through. At the very least she would have understood. She generally understood me. More so than anyone else. More so than I understood myself at times. But I owed her not to make her funeral memorable for the wrong reasons, so I walked out without another word.
“I ended up at the tennis court. Just as I had done after Maman, after father, I picked up my racket and hit ball after ball after ball. I set up the ball machine and just kept going. Mycroft appeared briefly, but didn’t say anything. A little while later, Joseph appeared and without a word picked up a spare racket and we fell into our old game, him trying to make me run, me trying to hit him with a shot. We went on until I finally stopped, packed up the gear and walked away.
“I went down to the court every day after that, practiced my serves, my strokes, my footwork. The same thing over and over again, hour after hour, day after day, just as I had done as a child. There was a point during that time that I finally realised why it was Maman had stopped singing. How can you possibly sing when you feel like that?”
He thought it was a rhetorical question, but then the pause went on and Sherlock didn’t move.
“I don’t know,” he said softly.
“Neither do I,” Sherlock said with the hint of a sigh. “Of course the others couldn’t tell me either but that didn’t stop them trying to talk to me. They kept telling me that it wasn’t healthy. Kept telling me I should return to the tour. That I shouldn’t stay hidden away. Talking, always talking, until I had enough. It was too much. Far too much. So I did it. I did the only thing I could do. I ran away.”
He said the last three words with clarity and precision. Just three simple words, but with so much meaning and consequences behind them.
“You ran away?” John said just to be sure.
“I ran away,” Sherlock repeated.
“How did you… oh.” He felt Sherlock’s half smile. “Of course. Your bike. You had a bike.”
“And a passport and a bank account of cash,” Sherlock said. “Being multilingual certainly didn’t hinder me either.”
“So what, you packed a bag and slipped out in the middle of the night?”
“Pretty much. I went just as the sun was coming up, my rackets and mobile left on my bed. It was almost distressingly easy. I withdrew what money I could from the first open bank I found and then rode as far as I could. I ate when I was hungry, stopped when I was tired and filled up when the bike was running low. I paid for everything in cash and shaved my hair at the first hotel I stopped at. Well, when I say hotel.” He twisted his head to offer a sardonic smile.
“Mainland Europe became my home. In one place I was French, the next an English student on a European tour, then a lost German. I set out to forget and ended up doing stuff I never dreamt of. I slept in places I wouldn’t recommend, wore the same clothing for days straight, tested my tolerance for alcohol. You wanted to know how I started smoking. I started because I was offered, because it was there, because there was no reason for me not to. Tennis, my future, my health, they didn’t concerned me. Very little concerned me. That was the point.
“I’m not ashamed of what I did, but I’m not proud of it either. It’s now part of who I am and I learnt more than you could imagine. Sex for instance.” He leant back into John’s embrace. “Sex wasn’t something that had interested me before then. The incident with Moriarty had halted me temporarily, but now I had no reason to ignore it. Europe became my bedroom.”
John stiffened, he couldn’t help it. He knew he had no right, but the idea of other people, lots of other people, touching Sherlock, a young Sherlock, a young vulnerable Sherlock, brought out a possessive streak in him.
Sherlock bit back a laugh. “I’m clean,” he said with a bite. “You needn’t worry. I was foolish and naïve, but never stupid, and Mycroft’s had me tested for everything. You’re not at risk.”
“Wasn’t concerned about that,” John said honestly, pressing a kiss to Sherlock’s shoulder. “But being careful with your body and being careful with your heart, well, those aren’t exactly the same thing. Trust me, I know.”
There was a pause, a long one and John wondered if he had stepped over some kind of mark, but Sherlock hadn’t moved, so he wouldn’t move either. He just waited.
“They left me.”
And closed his eyes when Sherlock finally continued.
“They all left me. All of them. They got what they wanted and then they left. They only really cared about what I could do for them or to them. One young lady relieved me of nearly five hundred euros before she left, taken from my pocket while I slept. I got into a fight with another guy’s boyfriend when his partner came home unexpectedly. Fortunately the sparing training I had done along with the other fitness and tennis training came in handy, but it reminded me that attachments weren’t worth it.
“I spent a month in Amsterdam, with a prostitute. She must have been twice my age, handsome, but sad. She taught me Dutch and sex and that ultimately nothing lasts. She taught me everything and then more, then she turned me out. It was clearly an act of mercy. She knew I had developed an… attachment, so she did the only thing she could do. I hated her for it. That, I suppose, was rather the point.”
“Mycroft came after me once three months had lapsed and it was clear I wasn’t coming back. I slipped through his fingers then but he found me again six weeks later, outside a café in Prague, a cigarette in my fingers, bags under my eyes. He’d lost so much weight that I didn’t recognise him at first, but of course he recognised me, even with the blond highlights I had added to the waves of my hair and the cheekbones that had taken prominence. This time he was firm and was determined to make me see reason. Grand-mere, he said, had not sacrificed money, time and energy for my training just for me to throw it all away. I told him to fuck off. He told me no, that I was killing myself and that running away was the cowards way out. If I really wanted to honour Grand-mere’s memory I should do what she had always believed I could do, go out there and win something. Win a Grand Slam and prove her right.
“So I went. I returned to the courts, to my training and I threw myself back in. It wasn’t easy but I was determined and Mycroft was determined that previous mistakes wouldn’t be repeated. He brought in Lestrade as my personal assistant, bodyguard, sounding board and anything else I might need him for. He had me tested for everything you could think of and more. In some ways I was lucky that the worse I come away with was a new addiction to nicotine. He backed up the story that I had been recovering from an injury, hidden away in a special facility in Switzerland of all places. He even sent me there just to make it more authentic. I had to spend three weeks in a facility near a bloody waterfall. By the time I was allowed back I was itching to get back on a court, anything to stop the mind numbing boredom.
“Victor was next; a new training partner, someone to steady me. A new coach came with him and I was back on the way up. Nothing and nobody was ever going to emotionally compromise me again. No one would mean that much. I would have no weakness, no distraction, nothing to stop me from going out there and winning that Grand Slam. For Grand-mere. For Father and Maman. For me.”
He stopped talking and John found himself at a loss of what to say. What the hell were you supposed to say to follow something like that? His chest ached around his heart as his mind turned over what he had heard. It explained a lot. So much, he realised. Far more than he had thought it would. Sherlock’s outlook, his attitude, the way he treated people, the way he had thought he would leave.
He pressed another kiss to Sherlock’s shoulder, tightening his arms around him. Never let go.
“Your brother was wrong,” he said softly.
Sherlock snorted. “Probably,” he said. “But enlighten me. What in particular was he wrong about this time?”
“That caring isn’t an advantage. Your grandmother sounds like a remarkable woman. Strong. Determined. Wise.”
“She was.”
“And she cared. Didn’t she? She cared about you, about Mycroft, about your mother. She took you in, she raised you, she understood you. She loved you. And you loved her too. That makes you stronger, not weaker. To stand out there and keep going the way you have, that’s incredible. That amount of loss, well, a few months out to find yourself is nothing. We’ve all done stupid things. I know I have. It doesn’t change anything, well other than that fact you make more sense now.”
“More sense?” Sherlock turned his head, a furrow between his eyebrows as he frowned.
“The way you are,” John explained. “It actually explains a great deal. Thank you for telling me.”
“I… you’re welcome.” He sucked in a breath. “What do we do now?”
It was a valid question but one that made John smile because he knew it was genuine. They had just bared their souls to each other, so now what. Leaning forward, he pressed a kiss to Sherlock’s lips and then brushed away an errant curl.
“Now,” he said with a slight shrug, “we have a choice.”
“Oh?”
“Mmmm,” he said. “Between cuddle-food-sleep. Or food-cuddle-sleep. Since it’s, oooh, ridiculously late, I’m favouring the ‘raid the fridge and make do’ method of food finding, but that does involve having to let go of each other and I’m rather loathed to do it quite yet. But either way, sleep is a must, because you’re bloody exhausted and just watching that match did me in, let alone everything that followed, so no arguments on that score. After that, well, I’m sure we’ll figure it out. What do you say?”
Sherlock stared at him for a moment, his expression blank before a smile crept across his face. “I think that sounds perfect.”
*
End Part Eleven
Author’s Note -
Well, there you go, answers. Some of them at least.
To all those who spotted the lyrics to A La Claire Fontaine in part 8 while Sherlock is dreaming, well done. For those who don’t know, it is a well-known and popular French lullaby. The lines that Sherlock’s says in the dream are translated as:
Il y a longtemps que je t’aime.
Jamais je ne t’oublierai!
I’ve been loving you for a long time,
I’ll never forget you!
His dream was a merge of his greatest fears and losses; his mother, his grandmother and also John.
Here’s a link for the song. The lyrics are in the notes in both French and English.
For those of you scratching your heads regarding aspects of Sherlock’s background in this, some of it has been stolen from the original canon.
Siger and Violet Holmes is from Baring-Gould’s “biography” of Holmes, Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street. Siger because in “The Adventure of the Empty House” Sherlock tells Watson he spent some time pretending to be a Norwegian called Sigerson, which Baring-Gould read literally as meaning “son of Siger”. Violet because Doyle was very fond of the name with four Violets cropping up in the stories. Violet worked especially well in this story due to its French roots and because it can be shortened to Vie, as in “c'est la vie", vie meaning ‘life’.
In canon, Holmes never mentions his background or family, except in “The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter” in which he states that, “My ancestors were country squires,” which gave me the English side of the family, and, “my grandmother… was the sister of Vernet, the French artist”, which is the French side. Yes, the French link wasn’t just invented for this story. Exploited for plot reasons, certainly, but not totally invented. Incidentally there are a number of artists in the Vernet family; Antoine Vernet, Claude Joseph Vernet, Carle Vernet and Horace Vernet (father, son, grandson, great-grandson). “Art in the blood,” Holmes went on to say, “is liable to take the strangest forms.”
Mention of canon Sherlock Holmes in this Sherlock Holmes’ family tree was an indulgence on my part, but hey, it’s my story. :) My head canon has this tennis Sherlock a descendent of Sherrinford Holmes, the unnamed eldest brother of the canon Holmes.
Incidentally, my head canon for this Jim Moriarty is that he’s the descendent of canon Moriarty’s brother - who may or may not have also been called James, Doyle was terrible at keeping names straight. The brother either emigrated to the United States, or one of his descendants did. Either way, the Moriarty in this story is of Irish American descent.
Right, I think that’s everything for now.
Next chapter will be in two weeks’ time because I’ve barely written a word. By my (revised) estimate there are about four chapters to go in this story, but really it depends upon Sherlock and John. I had thought that the story would be over by now. See how much I know.
Author: jupiter_ash
Rating: NC17
Beta: trillsabells
Word Count: 7K this part. 74k+ so far and (still) growing.
Pairings: Sherlock/John
Disclaimer: Sherlock Holmes created by ACD, Sherlock owned by Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss.
Summary: Sequel to A Study in Winning. Because winning Wimbledon is one thing, maintaining a relationship is something else entirely.
Warnings: Graphic sex, swearing, French.
Spoilers: Some for S2; mainly throwaway lines and some character appearances. No spoilers for S2 episode plots.
*
A Study in Doubles
Part Eleven
*
“It wasn’t just the doubles, was it?”
He had no idea how long they had been simply lying there for. It might have been ten minutes or an hour since he had left the bed and his partner’s embrace only long enough for a trip to the bathroom and the retrieval of a damp towel. The clean-up had been gentle but perfunctory, Sherlock’s eyes never leaving him until the towel was tossed away and they were once more on the bed.
The anger of the argument and the passion of their coupling had given away to a feeling akin to mild awkwardness as if neither of them were sure as to what was supposed to happen next. They may have finally gotten onto the same page in terms of their emotions and views on their relationship, and they might have affirmed it with heart stopping sex, but that didn’t mean that everything was now okay. In fact, John was pretty sure that a number of issues hadn’t been covered, but the most pressing was the question of what they were now supposed to do. How do you follow all of that raw emotion up?
By taking another risk, he realised, and opening his arms, motioned for Sherlock to move into them. There was barely a moment of hesitation before Sherlock was curling up next to him, their bodies once more entwining. Funny, he had never really taken Sherlock to be a snuggler, but right now there was no other word for it. Head tucked under his arm, ear pressed to his chest, legs entangling with his, there was nothing else it could be. Apparently snuggling was something that Sherlock did and that was more than fine. It just suggested that there were a lot of other things he might not yet know about his lover, or been mistaken about, which was when it finally dawned on him. Of course it hadn’t just been the doubles.
At the question, Sherlock shifted slightly, the arm slung around his waist tightening instinctively, but he didn’t deny it. The doubles had only been a part of it. That didn’t surprise him. Now that he knew the truth about Sherlock’s motivations it had thrown a completely different light on so many things to the point where he wondered how he had never noticed before.
“You’ve been trying to give me reasons to stay, haven’t you?” he continued, making sure that his arm held Sherlock tightly to him in turn. The last thing he wanted was for Sherlock to take the conversation as some kind of rejection. “The meals out, the clothes, the tourist holiday in LA.” The bike ride, the famous friends, the gorgeous suites, trying to treat him, trying to pay, watching films Sherlock knew he liked, the massages, the hand job. Oh god, he really was an idiot, wasn’t he? How had he missed it all? How?
“It seemed prudent to encourage your interest in my companionship,” Sherlock mumbled, staring off into the distance. “I was assured that that was how a relationship worked.”
“Oh? Assured by whom?”
He really hoped the answer wasn’t TV programmes, films or magazines.
“By anyone who cared to voice an opinion. My brother explicitly informed me not to screw it up.”
“Your brother?”
“Lestrade told me to try and be less of an arse than usual.”
“Lestrade said that?”
“Mrs Hudson said not to take you for granted and that doing thoughtful things for the other person was what kept a relationship alive, although she did get vague in regards to what thoughtful things I should do. Flowers in your case seemed pointless, meals out ended with disagreements over who picked up the bill, and new clothing, that you would never otherwise treat yourself to, weren’t received as well as I had hope.”
Oh god.
“Irene said I should trust you more, that you were clearly crazy enough to put up with me, but there is always a limit to a person’s interest, affection and ability to ‘put up with me’. You are a number of surprising things, John, but you are not a mere spectator.”
No, he wasn’t.
He closed his eyes, a flash of emotional pain shooting through him, not because Sherlock was wrong, but because deep down he knew that Sherlock was right. He wasn’t just a mere spectator, he never had been. He needed to be part of something, to be involved, he couldn’t just watch as it happened around him.
“I’m sorry,” he said. For not noticing, for reacting badly to the tokens of affection, for not being capable of just sitting and watching like all the other partners of tennis players.
“Don’t be,” Sherlock said. “I have no interest in changing you or in you being anything other than yourself.”
From Sherlock that was akin to a declaration of the highest order.
“Likewise,” he said, bending his head to press a kiss to the thick curls. “You don’t have to keep trying so hard to keep me. And while, yeah, doing, how did Mrs Hudson put it, oh yeah, thoughtful things. And while doing thoughtful things is very much appreciated, I really don’t want you practically killing yourself for them. I really don’t like to see you exhausted, or in pain, or on the edge of some sort of breakdown, especially if I’m the cause. Alright?”
“Noted.”
“Good. It’s not going to work though,” he added after a moment, stroking his fingers through the soft curls of Sherlock’s hair. “This plan of yours, which you should have talked to me about first incidentally. You can’t keep playing both the singles and the doubles. It’s too much.” And he was not about to let Sherlock throw away his singles career for him.
“I know.”
Sherlock’s voice was quiet and just a little bit broken. The arm across his chest pulled them closer together, Sherlock’s head slipping down to pressed against his stomach. The action said everything. ‘I know, but I don’t want to let you go’.
“It’s okay,” he whispered. “We’ll come up with something.”
They lay like that in silence, holding each other, neither willing to let go. He still had a lot of questions, about Moriarty, about the past, but he didn’t want to ask, didn’t want to give Sherlock a reason to pull away. They had come so far, after all. Further in the past few hours than in the past few months combined. He could now allow himself to see their possible future, beyond the immediate forthcoming months, beyond the end of the season and into the New Year and further still. He wasn’t about to allow their past to upset their future, and god knows, he had his own history, his own problems, his own issues. Oh yes, he did.
“I have trust issues,” he said, the words leaving his mouth before he could censor them. He gave a very small laugh. “Or at least that’s what my therapist claimed. Was never sure if I should believe her, which I suppose just proves the point.”
Trust issues was just the beginning of what had been said during some of his sessions. After Mary, after the accident, after his career had come to a screaming halt and he had been lost and in pain he had spent many hours with his therapist, some hours more productive than others. It had helped, a bit, until he had ended it and decided to grit his teeth and continue on his own.
“Mary always claimed I had commitment issues as well. I know I’ve got impulse control problems. Gambling was my worse. Poker, strip poker, fine, just don’t let me near anything to do with money. I’ve wasted more than enough over the years.”
What else was there?
“I have a temper, but you know that by now. You’re only my third relationship. The other two were with women. Sarah and I broke up because I didn’t love her. Mary and I, well, I used the words but they were without meaning. Empty, she called them. Worthless. After that I vowed never to do that again, to use the words when I didn’t mean them, so you can guess what happened with Sarah.”
They fell back into silence, Sherlock’s breath puffing against the soft skin on his tummy, his leg lifting to slip further over.
“You scare me.”
He really hadn’t planned to say that.
“Not you,” he quickly amended as he felt Sherlock tighten against him. “More, what you make me feel. I never thought I would… well, you’re different. Different from anyone else I’ve ever been with, and not just because you’re a man, because well, we’ve already covered that I suppose, but because you just are. I don’t want to lose you. You’re the first person I’ve ever felt that for. I just thought you should know. This is new for me too.”
They fell back into silence.
“Is this where I’m supposed to tell you about my past?”
John blinked for a moment, noted the words, ran them back through his mind and then through his unofficial Sherlock Holmes translator. Ah, a little vulnerability, a little awkwardness, a noticeable amount of uncertainty. Not something to be offended at.
“Only if you want to,” he said lightly.
“But you want to know.”
He pulled a slight face and guessed that Sherlock would be able to tell it was there even without looking so there wasn’t any point in pretending otherwise. “I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t curious,” he admitted, “But this isn’t some quid pro quo. I’m not going to push you. You’ll tell me when you’re ready, even if it’s twenty years from now.”
He loosened his grasp as Sherlock pulled up, a touch of a frown on his face as he propped himself up, pale eyes looking into his intensely.
“You sound so sure,” Sherlock said after the moment.
“That you’ll tell me or that we’ll still be together in twenty years from now?” he asked carefully.
“Both.”
He gave a small shrug. “Maybe it’s because I am.”
“Why?”
“Because I hope that one day you’ll believe me when I say I’m not going to leave you and nothing you tell me about your past will change that.”
There was another pause, Sherlock’s eyes searching his deeply as if looking for something. He must have found it or been satisfied as after a moment he pressed forward, pushing their lips together in a warm kiss before sliding down to settle back where they had been, ear to his chest.
“You’ve read my Wikipedia page.”
It was a statement, not a question, and while he had been hoping that Sherlock might finally trust him enough to unburden his past, he hadn’t been totally expecting it.
“Yes,” he said.
“You know how I was raised.”
He nodded slightly. “In France, by your grandmother. Your mother’s mother,” he clarified. “She’s the one who encouraged your tennis. She paid for your training.”
“She did.” There was another pause. “It wasn’t always like that though.”
There was another pause, a long one, long enough that he wondered if that was all he would be getting. It was, after all, something. Not what he had been expecting, but something none the less. He knew that Sherlock had been born in England, that his father was English, but he hadn’t really thought that there must have been a story behind Sherlock’s upbringing in France. Part of him had just presumed that it had been down to the tennis. The French grassroots system for tennis was far superior to the British version. It was no accident that there were far more top class French tennis players than British ones. Wikipedia hadn’t said much. The rest of Sherlock’s background, he realised, was a mystery.
Would he find out now? He kept his silence, waited, and then Sherlock started to speak, distantly and somewhat detached.
“My father died when I was four. Heart attack. One moment he was there, the next he was a stranger in a casket. That was when everything changed.”
Sherlock shifted slightly but didn’t move away.
“Maman was never the same after that. Something died with him. She was like a shadow, a wraith. You could say I lost two parents that day.”
Oh god. He ‘knew’ that Sherlock’s parents weren’t around, but it sounded different when it came from Sherlock’s lips. More real somehow.
“They met in 1973,” Sherlock continued, “at Place de la Sorbonne, in Paris. He was in Paris to confer with a renowned colleague and lecturer over some scientific research. She was an art student with an interest in architecture, music and poetry, taking photos for a project. They bumped into each other, quite literally I’m assured, the immediate outcome of which involved a spilt coffee and a ruined bl`ouse. I’m also assured that somewhere between the acute mortification and extensive apologies, it was love at first sight. Certainly they married two years later. He was thirty-seven, she just twenty-two.”
Thirty-seven and twenty-two? And to think he had been concerned about the six years between him and Sherlock.
“Despite the considerable age gap, neither family upheld any meaningful objection. My father was the grandson of a Baron on his mother’s side, country squires on his father’s. His interests had always lain with the academic and research over romance and women. I do believe the family had at some point thought him to be the ‘other way inclined’ and were satisfied with his discretion and apparent lack of interest in pursuing anyone they would have cause to disapprove of. Eccentricity runs in the family, as does homosexual tendencies. It’s rarely spoken of, but my father’s great uncle, after whom I was named, spent his retirement years in Sussex with his bees and widower doctor friend of his. No-one in the family questioned it. I’m sure they would barely raise an eyebrow at us.”
Sherlock’s lips curved into a smile, which John felt pressed to the skin on his side. He brushed his fingers through Sherlock’s curls in response but didn’t interrupt.
“My mother was what you might call a free spirit, hardly surprising in a family who had produced a number of world renowned painters and less known musicians, sculptors and dancers. She was beautiful, alive. So alive. She was also the youngest, the fey child, always happy, always dancing, never a care in the world. The others doted on her, spoilt her to some extent, sheltered her from the cruelness of life. Art was her love and she could see beauty in anything. In the falling of a leaf, in the crack in a paving stone, in the ringing of raindrops on a metal roof. Somehow she saw it in my father, a pale, withdrawn, studious man, awkward in his British reserve, hiding away from the world with his books and his research. For my mother, marrying for love to an eccentric English scientist fifteen years her senior was both the most traditional and the most bohemian thing she would ever do.
“His work was in England, so that was where she joined him. He worked, she sung. She used to sing a lot. A la claire fontaine. M’en allant promener. J’ai trouvé l’eau si belle. Que je m’y suis baignée. Il y a longtemps que je t’aime. Jamais je ne t’oublierai ! That was her song, or at least one of them. I’ve never been able to hear it since without remembering her, the way she would dance around while singing it. The grace of a willow in a gentle breeze.”
His voice trailed off for a moment, but only for a moment and then he was back, the words crisp and precise again.
“Mycroft was born three years after they married. Father was forty. I don’t think he’d ever really considered children before that. It all came as rather a surprise. Nine months might be enough to come to terms with the idea, but the reality-” His lips twitched. “There’s this picture of him, a chubby dark haired infant in his arms and he’s looking down with an expression you can only describe as a mixture of amazement, horror and astonishment. Stunned but proud. Children were something that other people had, but there he was. Forty years old, revered academically, financially secure, beautiful wife and now a son.
“Seven years later I was born. Maman had wanted a second child. She was still young after all and father had no objections. I honestly think he would have given her anything she asked for if it had been within his power. Another baby was nothing.
“Four years after that Father was gone. They had only fourteen years of marriage, sixteen together in total. Till death do us part. A lifetime, it seems, is not nearly as long as you think it’s going to be.”
He paused for a moment and John could feel the hand curved around his side pressing just that little bit closer, as if by holding on tighter Sherlock could stop anything from happening to him. He tightened his own arm around Sherlock, equally not wanting to let him go.
“I have very few memories of father,” Sherlock continued after a moment. “I know Mycroft resembles him far more than I do, more so if you imagine Mycroft with fairer, redder hair, a beard and glasses. I remember he used to laugh when he tossed me into the air and he smelt of old books. Mycroft remembers more of course but he’s not inclined to share. He and father were much alike, in looks and in temperament. I’m far more like Maman’s family.
“I do remember the casket though. A smooth, polished mahogany with a high gloss finish, white velvet interior and gleaming metal handles. The man inside it was not father though, it was a pale stranger who resembled father in the basic features but that was it. I remember black suits, the pungent smell of lilies, and having to be quiet. I remember Grand-mere being there and hushed words spoken in French too fast for me to understand. And I remember Maman crying. Always crying. Even when she was pretending not to be. She was just thirty-five, far too young to be a widow with two young boys. She tried her best though, she kept her composure during the funeral, the dutiful English widow, beautiful but stoic, but afterwards everything just stopped. She stopped singing, she stopped dancing and she was always crying. ‘Pourquoi pleures-tu?’ I remember asking her. Why are you crying?”
“You can probably guess the next part. With Father gone we had no reason to stay in England, so Maman accepted Grand-mere’s offer to return to the big house in Dordogne. Being young and naïve I initially thought it to be temporary, like the summers we had spent there, but at some point I must have realised that we weren’t returning to England. So I lost my father, my home, my friends and Maman just kept crying. Then Mycroft left for boarding school and other than screaming and howling, I didn’t speak for months. At her wits end, Grand-mere marched me down to the tennis court, handed me a racket and told me to take my anger and frustration out on the balls. She threw them, I hit them. She threw them harder, I hit them harder. She threw them faster, then she got my cousin to throw them. After I hit him with a number of returns they realised I had a natural talent. Grand-mere then brought in a tennis trainer who confirmed that I had real potential and as to the sport, the rest is history.”
It was, and a history that John had practically memorised. Junior French Open champion aged sixteen. Junior Australian and Wimbledon finalist. Professional at seventeen. Top twenty by twenty-one. Top ten by twenty-two. Top five a year later and now ranked third with numerous titles to his name, but still chasing that illusive Grand Slam.
“It probably won’t surprise you that I was home schooled.”
He smiled slightly. Sherlock was right, that didn’t surprise him.
“They brought in tutors, nearly a dozen in the end, teaching in both French and English. Maman was insistent that we retained our English without accent and with a wide vocabulary, just as she had insisted the same for our French while we had been in England. Seven years my senior, Mycroft was already fluent in English, French, German and Spanish, with groundings in Ancient Greek and Latin. I saw very little of him once he went away. It was his choice to board and Grand-mere gave him the choice of any exclusive boarding school in Europe. He chose Schule Schloss Salem in Germany. I’ve always thought it was his way of coping, a fresh start in a country that held no memories for him. I, on the other hand, was stuck at the house watching as Maman sank further and further down. There were days when she didn’t leave her bed. Weeks when she barely left her room. Some days she was almost back to normal, and those were the hardest, because they never lasted. Inevitably I would do something or say something and then the tears would start again and Grand-mere would bustle me away, back to my bedroom, or down to the tennis court, telling me that it wasn’t my fault, but I knew it was. Of course it was. If only I learnt what to avoid, then she wouldn’t breakdown again.”
Oh god.
“I even made tables, charts, spider diagrams, trying to find the pattern, but I never did solve it.”
Because there was nothing to solve, John thought, his heart aching as he pictured a young Sherlock trying to make sense of his mother’s depression and heartbreak. It explained so much, including why he didn’t let people close to him.
“What happened?” he asked gently after Sherlock had lapsed into silence. He had a feeling the ending wasn’t going to be particularly happy. But then again, he’d read the Wikipedia page.
“She died, just before I turned eight.”
Christ.
“The official ruling was death by misadventure. I’ve never been certain. She had been on so many drugs, to help her sleep, to hold back her depression, for her migraines, that it could well have been a tragic accident.”
Or it could have been on purpose.
“Either way, like father she too was suddenly gone.”
John tightened his arm around Sherlock’s shoulder. “I’m sorry.”
“Yes, well, simple fact of life, that’s what Mycroft told me years later. All lives end. All hearts are broken. Caring is not an advantage. Caring is what killed her.”
No wonder Sherlock had issues.
“I threw myself into my tennis then, kept my loneliness and anger at bay by spending every free moment hitting balls back over a net. It was my main escape, although it wasn’t long before I started to physically escape as well, first on foot, then on Mycroft’s moped. I would disappear for hours. The moped was exhilarating. It made me feel something when nothing else did. Grand-mere knew exactly what I was doing, but she didn’t stop me. She knew I had to work out my grief in my own way.
“Then Mycroft came back. I was fourteen. It had been years since I’d spent any substantial time with him. The boy I remembered had turned into a man. He had a degree from Oxford under his belt, the same college as Father had been to. He had job offers from both the French and the British governments. With his sharp mind and his languages he could have gone into the foreign office, become a diplomat or an ambassador, a civil servant at least. He could have gone into research like Father, run a company, become a consultant of some sort, but he didn’t. He just asked me if I was serious about the tennis and when I said yes he took over the role of my guardianship and we toured Europe on the junior circuit. He could have run a country, but instead he structured his life around me. ‘You’re all I have left’, he said. You have no idea how much I’ve hated him for that.
“With single-mindedness and perseverance I rose through the junior ranks. Most of that you know of course. I turned professional just after my seventeenth birthday. Mycroft said I was being rash. I didn’t listen of course. Then came the incident with Moriarty. What you won’t know is what happened eighteen months later.”
For a moment there was a pause and then Sherlock was pulling away. Startled, John propped himself up as Sherlock settled on the edge of the bed, the broad, smooth curve of his back facing him. The relief that Sherlock hadn’t fully run away was tempered by the fact he had moved to physically put distance between them. Was it that bad, he wondered, that even now he felt the need for distance?
“Sherlock?”
“I wasn’t injured.” The words cut through the silence. “I know what my Wikipedia page says, I wrote it, but it’s a lie. That’s the official story, but there was no injury when I was nineteen, at least no physical one.”
Oh, right. John frowned slightly as he tried to remember what he had read. Even Wikipedia had been vague, but there was no doubt that Sherlock had been absent from the tennis scene for the best part of a year.
“Grand-mere died.”
Oh.
“Cancer got her in the end,” Sherlock continued. He then gave a brief bark of a laugh. “Well, nothing else was going to take her down, not the woman who had been born in the middle of one war, survived the flu epidemic that claimed her mother and two brothers, lived through the Nazi occupation of another war, lost one child to cot death and later a husband to pneumonia, raised three children and various grandchildren and refused to be defeated. She was the strongest person I knew and I thought she would be there forever. Turns out I was wrong.” He pressed his lips together, his shoulders slumping slightly.
Reaching out, John hesitated before pressing a hand to the shoulder. “Sherlock.”
“I’m fine,” Sherlock said but didn’t move to avoid the hand. Taking that as a good thing, John shifted so they were a little closer and let the hand slip down Sherlock’s arm until their fingers entwined and Sherlock returned to staring in front.
“For me it was sudden. For everyone else, well, let’s say they had plenty of time. Do you have any idea what it’s like to know that everyone else knew? That you were the last because they didn’t bother telling you?” He turned his head and John could see the hurt he obviously still felt. “My own brother didn’t even tell me. You should have heard my language. Grand-mere would have been appalled, but it boiled down to the fact he should have told me. Someone should have told me.”
Yes, it sounded like someone should have done.
“Why didn’t they?” he asked.
“They claimed they thought it would distract me. Apparently they hadn’t wanted me to lose focus.”
“They were trying to protect you.”
“As if I were a child. As if she was just my Grandmother and nothing else. I knew far more about death and loss than they did, I was far closer to her than Mycroft was, and by the time I got there I barely had time to say goodbye. The woman who had raised me since I was seven, the only constant in my life since I had been four, the first person to put a racket in my hand and see my potential, who had paid for the lessons and training, who had had the court at the house specially re-laid to the highest standard, who had always believed in me and pushed me to be better, lay sick and dying and no one had breathed a fucking word.”
He sucked in a deep breath, dropping his chin to his chest as his fingers tightened around the bed sheets and around John’s hand.
“Sorry,” he whispered.
“Don’t be,” John said back firmly and scooted up closer behind his lover, wrapping his free arm around him and dropping a kiss onto his shoulder. “Don’t ever be sorry about this. You’re entitled to be angry. God, I would be angry too. Don’t think it makes you any less, alright?”
There was a faint nod and just as John was wondering if he should stay like that or move back, Sherlock’s hand caught his, their fingers entwining.
“I was on tour when they finally told me. It was Joseph, who did it. My cousin. Well, one of them. The same one I had hit the balls at all those years before. He grabbed the phone and blurted it out before anyone could stop him. ‘Grand-mere’s dying’ he said. ‘Elle est en train de mourir du cancer’. She’s dying of cancer. Come home before it’s too late. I was on the next flight available. I’m not even sure what I told the tournament organisers. Injury, family emergency, didn’t matter. I pulled out and went. Longest flight of my life. By the time I got there, well, her time left was measured in days, not weeks, and then she was gone. Like Father, like Maman. Gone.
“By law the house was split between the children, Maman’s share coming to Mycroft and me. Those who didn’t want it, Mycroft and I bought out their parts. Father’s inheritance had been generous and I had money by then, even if Mycroft controlled most of it. Joseph and his family live in the main house now. It’s good. The house needs a family. Mycroft and I have our own parts as well. I’ll take you there.” Their eyes met as Sherlock turned his head. “You can see where I grew up, meet Joseph. You’ll like him I think.”
He could see a touch of hesitation in Sherlock’s eyes. Unnecessary of course.
“I’d like that,” he said offering a small smile.
Sherlock nodded, briefly squeezing his hand and turning away again.
“Then there was the funeral. Well, it was a funeral. Another funeral. We buried her next to Grand-pere. Everyone came. Everyone. There were so many people. They kept coming. Kept bringing flowers. Kept repeating how sorry they were for our loss. I was supposed to stay and nod and be the dutiful grandson but I just wanted to get out of there. Then it got worse, because afterwards they all wanted to talk to me again. Not about Grand-mere though. No, they wanted to talk about the tennis. How are you doing? Oh we’re so proud of you. We saw you on telly. You’re so good. When are you going to win something important? It was hideous. Hateful. It was all I could do not to tell them what I really thought, but that would have caused a scene and the rest of the family would have been upset. I don’t think Grand-mere would have minded through. At the very least she would have understood. She generally understood me. More so than anyone else. More so than I understood myself at times. But I owed her not to make her funeral memorable for the wrong reasons, so I walked out without another word.
“I ended up at the tennis court. Just as I had done after Maman, after father, I picked up my racket and hit ball after ball after ball. I set up the ball machine and just kept going. Mycroft appeared briefly, but didn’t say anything. A little while later, Joseph appeared and without a word picked up a spare racket and we fell into our old game, him trying to make me run, me trying to hit him with a shot. We went on until I finally stopped, packed up the gear and walked away.
“I went down to the court every day after that, practiced my serves, my strokes, my footwork. The same thing over and over again, hour after hour, day after day, just as I had done as a child. There was a point during that time that I finally realised why it was Maman had stopped singing. How can you possibly sing when you feel like that?”
He thought it was a rhetorical question, but then the pause went on and Sherlock didn’t move.
“I don’t know,” he said softly.
“Neither do I,” Sherlock said with the hint of a sigh. “Of course the others couldn’t tell me either but that didn’t stop them trying to talk to me. They kept telling me that it wasn’t healthy. Kept telling me I should return to the tour. That I shouldn’t stay hidden away. Talking, always talking, until I had enough. It was too much. Far too much. So I did it. I did the only thing I could do. I ran away.”
He said the last three words with clarity and precision. Just three simple words, but with so much meaning and consequences behind them.
“You ran away?” John said just to be sure.
“I ran away,” Sherlock repeated.
“How did you… oh.” He felt Sherlock’s half smile. “Of course. Your bike. You had a bike.”
“And a passport and a bank account of cash,” Sherlock said. “Being multilingual certainly didn’t hinder me either.”
“So what, you packed a bag and slipped out in the middle of the night?”
“Pretty much. I went just as the sun was coming up, my rackets and mobile left on my bed. It was almost distressingly easy. I withdrew what money I could from the first open bank I found and then rode as far as I could. I ate when I was hungry, stopped when I was tired and filled up when the bike was running low. I paid for everything in cash and shaved my hair at the first hotel I stopped at. Well, when I say hotel.” He twisted his head to offer a sardonic smile.
“Mainland Europe became my home. In one place I was French, the next an English student on a European tour, then a lost German. I set out to forget and ended up doing stuff I never dreamt of. I slept in places I wouldn’t recommend, wore the same clothing for days straight, tested my tolerance for alcohol. You wanted to know how I started smoking. I started because I was offered, because it was there, because there was no reason for me not to. Tennis, my future, my health, they didn’t concerned me. Very little concerned me. That was the point.
“I’m not ashamed of what I did, but I’m not proud of it either. It’s now part of who I am and I learnt more than you could imagine. Sex for instance.” He leant back into John’s embrace. “Sex wasn’t something that had interested me before then. The incident with Moriarty had halted me temporarily, but now I had no reason to ignore it. Europe became my bedroom.”
John stiffened, he couldn’t help it. He knew he had no right, but the idea of other people, lots of other people, touching Sherlock, a young Sherlock, a young vulnerable Sherlock, brought out a possessive streak in him.
Sherlock bit back a laugh. “I’m clean,” he said with a bite. “You needn’t worry. I was foolish and naïve, but never stupid, and Mycroft’s had me tested for everything. You’re not at risk.”
“Wasn’t concerned about that,” John said honestly, pressing a kiss to Sherlock’s shoulder. “But being careful with your body and being careful with your heart, well, those aren’t exactly the same thing. Trust me, I know.”
There was a pause, a long one and John wondered if he had stepped over some kind of mark, but Sherlock hadn’t moved, so he wouldn’t move either. He just waited.
“They left me.”
And closed his eyes when Sherlock finally continued.
“They all left me. All of them. They got what they wanted and then they left. They only really cared about what I could do for them or to them. One young lady relieved me of nearly five hundred euros before she left, taken from my pocket while I slept. I got into a fight with another guy’s boyfriend when his partner came home unexpectedly. Fortunately the sparing training I had done along with the other fitness and tennis training came in handy, but it reminded me that attachments weren’t worth it.
“I spent a month in Amsterdam, with a prostitute. She must have been twice my age, handsome, but sad. She taught me Dutch and sex and that ultimately nothing lasts. She taught me everything and then more, then she turned me out. It was clearly an act of mercy. She knew I had developed an… attachment, so she did the only thing she could do. I hated her for it. That, I suppose, was rather the point.”
“Mycroft came after me once three months had lapsed and it was clear I wasn’t coming back. I slipped through his fingers then but he found me again six weeks later, outside a café in Prague, a cigarette in my fingers, bags under my eyes. He’d lost so much weight that I didn’t recognise him at first, but of course he recognised me, even with the blond highlights I had added to the waves of my hair and the cheekbones that had taken prominence. This time he was firm and was determined to make me see reason. Grand-mere, he said, had not sacrificed money, time and energy for my training just for me to throw it all away. I told him to fuck off. He told me no, that I was killing myself and that running away was the cowards way out. If I really wanted to honour Grand-mere’s memory I should do what she had always believed I could do, go out there and win something. Win a Grand Slam and prove her right.
“So I went. I returned to the courts, to my training and I threw myself back in. It wasn’t easy but I was determined and Mycroft was determined that previous mistakes wouldn’t be repeated. He brought in Lestrade as my personal assistant, bodyguard, sounding board and anything else I might need him for. He had me tested for everything you could think of and more. In some ways I was lucky that the worse I come away with was a new addiction to nicotine. He backed up the story that I had been recovering from an injury, hidden away in a special facility in Switzerland of all places. He even sent me there just to make it more authentic. I had to spend three weeks in a facility near a bloody waterfall. By the time I was allowed back I was itching to get back on a court, anything to stop the mind numbing boredom.
“Victor was next; a new training partner, someone to steady me. A new coach came with him and I was back on the way up. Nothing and nobody was ever going to emotionally compromise me again. No one would mean that much. I would have no weakness, no distraction, nothing to stop me from going out there and winning that Grand Slam. For Grand-mere. For Father and Maman. For me.”
He stopped talking and John found himself at a loss of what to say. What the hell were you supposed to say to follow something like that? His chest ached around his heart as his mind turned over what he had heard. It explained a lot. So much, he realised. Far more than he had thought it would. Sherlock’s outlook, his attitude, the way he treated people, the way he had thought he would leave.
He pressed another kiss to Sherlock’s shoulder, tightening his arms around him. Never let go.
“Your brother was wrong,” he said softly.
Sherlock snorted. “Probably,” he said. “But enlighten me. What in particular was he wrong about this time?”
“That caring isn’t an advantage. Your grandmother sounds like a remarkable woman. Strong. Determined. Wise.”
“She was.”
“And she cared. Didn’t she? She cared about you, about Mycroft, about your mother. She took you in, she raised you, she understood you. She loved you. And you loved her too. That makes you stronger, not weaker. To stand out there and keep going the way you have, that’s incredible. That amount of loss, well, a few months out to find yourself is nothing. We’ve all done stupid things. I know I have. It doesn’t change anything, well other than that fact you make more sense now.”
“More sense?” Sherlock turned his head, a furrow between his eyebrows as he frowned.
“The way you are,” John explained. “It actually explains a great deal. Thank you for telling me.”
“I… you’re welcome.” He sucked in a breath. “What do we do now?”
It was a valid question but one that made John smile because he knew it was genuine. They had just bared their souls to each other, so now what. Leaning forward, he pressed a kiss to Sherlock’s lips and then brushed away an errant curl.
“Now,” he said with a slight shrug, “we have a choice.”
“Oh?”
“Mmmm,” he said. “Between cuddle-food-sleep. Or food-cuddle-sleep. Since it’s, oooh, ridiculously late, I’m favouring the ‘raid the fridge and make do’ method of food finding, but that does involve having to let go of each other and I’m rather loathed to do it quite yet. But either way, sleep is a must, because you’re bloody exhausted and just watching that match did me in, let alone everything that followed, so no arguments on that score. After that, well, I’m sure we’ll figure it out. What do you say?”
Sherlock stared at him for a moment, his expression blank before a smile crept across his face. “I think that sounds perfect.”
*
End Part Eleven
Author’s Note -
Well, there you go, answers. Some of them at least.
To all those who spotted the lyrics to A La Claire Fontaine in part 8 while Sherlock is dreaming, well done. For those who don’t know, it is a well-known and popular French lullaby. The lines that Sherlock’s says in the dream are translated as:
Il y a longtemps que je t’aime.
Jamais je ne t’oublierai!
I’ve been loving you for a long time,
I’ll never forget you!
His dream was a merge of his greatest fears and losses; his mother, his grandmother and also John.
Here’s a link for the song. The lyrics are in the notes in both French and English.
For those of you scratching your heads regarding aspects of Sherlock’s background in this, some of it has been stolen from the original canon.
Siger and Violet Holmes is from Baring-Gould’s “biography” of Holmes, Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street. Siger because in “The Adventure of the Empty House” Sherlock tells Watson he spent some time pretending to be a Norwegian called Sigerson, which Baring-Gould read literally as meaning “son of Siger”. Violet because Doyle was very fond of the name with four Violets cropping up in the stories. Violet worked especially well in this story due to its French roots and because it can be shortened to Vie, as in “c'est la vie", vie meaning ‘life’.
In canon, Holmes never mentions his background or family, except in “The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter” in which he states that, “My ancestors were country squires,” which gave me the English side of the family, and, “my grandmother… was the sister of Vernet, the French artist”, which is the French side. Yes, the French link wasn’t just invented for this story. Exploited for plot reasons, certainly, but not totally invented. Incidentally there are a number of artists in the Vernet family; Antoine Vernet, Claude Joseph Vernet, Carle Vernet and Horace Vernet (father, son, grandson, great-grandson). “Art in the blood,” Holmes went on to say, “is liable to take the strangest forms.”
Mention of canon Sherlock Holmes in this Sherlock Holmes’ family tree was an indulgence on my part, but hey, it’s my story. :) My head canon has this tennis Sherlock a descendent of Sherrinford Holmes, the unnamed eldest brother of the canon Holmes.
Incidentally, my head canon for this Jim Moriarty is that he’s the descendent of canon Moriarty’s brother - who may or may not have also been called James, Doyle was terrible at keeping names straight. The brother either emigrated to the United States, or one of his descendants did. Either way, the Moriarty in this story is of Irish American descent.
Right, I think that’s everything for now.
Next chapter will be in two weeks’ time because I’ve barely written a word. By my (revised) estimate there are about four chapters to go in this story, but really it depends upon Sherlock and John. I had thought that the story would be over by now. See how much I know.