#561 - [FIC] Chiaroscuro (Sherlock, Mycroft)
Title: Chiaroscuro
Alternate Link: AO3
Word Count: 2244
Characters/Pairings: Sherlock (POV), Mycroft, OMC, background J/S
Rating: PG-13, contains non-explicit references to adult material
Summary: Sherlock keeps his memories of his father in a cigar box in his memory palace. All save one.
Warnings: Highlight here to see warnings. May be triggering: implied parent/child sexual abuse, implied incest, pedophilia, references to disordered eating and distorted body image, references to drug use and overdose, potentially disturbing imagery.
Author's Note: Originally written for this prompt at sherlockbbc-fic. Substantial edits (~500 words) have been made.
What you remember of your father can fit inside a cigar box. His preferred newspaper (the Telegraph), the sort of tobacco he put in his pipe (Gold Block), how he took his tea (extra milk, one sugar), nestled beside snapshots of memory that become real photographs in your mind palace. Though mundane, you thumb through them often enough that the edges have become worn, the glossy finish marred by your fingerprints: Daddy reading the paper at breakfast; Daddy carrying Mycroft up the stairs to sleep off a migraine; Daddy running a bath for Mycroft; Daddy tucking you both into bed and forgetting to kiss your forehead for the third night in a row.
New snapshots drift in every now and then, dragging fine, red threads behind them. You are rarely present in the frame. As you grow older, such instances are fewer and farther between. You can only suppose the rest has gone the way of the solar system and whatever social niceties public schooling attempted to instill in you, forgotten for good.
Today’s visit is prompted by a new case that bears a striking resemblance to an old case. Relief floods John’s face when you mention this, off-hand. You don’t bother to clarify that you never solved the first one.
Agitation makes you wander aimlessly down corridors you rarely bother to explore, as evinced by the bare white walls and the scant few threads that follow you as you walk past room after room, until you reach the outermost edge of your map. Behind these doors you house your ugliest feelings, your most hateful moments---everything that you keep not for pleasure or utility but for illustration. These are your weaknesses and your failures, meticulously catalogued to remind you that you are only a man and that you, too, make mistakes.
At the end of the hall lies the Shadow Room.
The first time you stumbled into it, you had immediately written it off as a glitch and emptied it. It is unusual for a single, unattached memory to sort itself, but not entirely unheard of. Fragments are more common for some sorts of memories than others. When you discovered it had not disappeared several visits later, you felt a faint stirring of unease. Nothing you’ve read mentions entire rooms that appear of their own accord, but there can be no doubt that you did not build the Shadow Room or deliberately place within it that singular, obscured memory that you have never been able to explain.
It is the only memory of your father that did not come from the cigar box. You don’t know where it came from, only that it appeared with the Shadow Room. The pictures blur and sometimes refuse to stay still. Strange objects cast shadows everywhere, rippling in your hands and breathing out smells of pipe tobacco and something astringent you’ve never managed to identify. Deleted, it regenerates. Relocated, it returns to the only room you have ever seen without the spider-webbing of emotional data cluttering the corners. Any threads that follow you in vanish upon departure. Nothing else will stick there.
There is little reason to idle once you review the case you came for, but something makes you twist the long, brass key you keep stuck in the doorknob of the Shadow Room. The room is cold, as it always is, and unlit. From your pocket, you pull out a candle to light your way to the small chest of drawers that sits in the center.
Somewhere a child is crying. The sound grows louder as you approach, but remains far away. Some memories imprint with smells and sounds, even tastes. Though only an echo, you find yourself looking for the source of the noise.
By the time you settle with the memory on your lap, the cries have faded. You close your eyes and let the memory pull you under.
Since childhood, you have been a poor sleeper. It's in the blood, Mummy said. You could set your watch by Mycroft's insomnia. After years of sharing a room, you have learned to filter out the sounds of him waking, but on the night of the memory, the creak of the door opens your eyes. Not wanting to give yourself away, you lie still and watchful in your bed. Light shines in from the hall and in the smudges of darkness you detect the outline of your father, leading Mycroft by the shoulders, as if he’s caught your brother sleepwalking. As the sound of Daddy's footsteps fades in a slow decrescendo, you hear the original source of the echo: Mycroft, crying.
Even Mycroft must cry sometimes, you reason. After all, you cry when you've skinned your knee on the pavement or when you're so saturated by stimulation that the slightest whisper can bring you to tears. Neither of these sounds anything like what Mycroft is doing in furtive, hiccupping bursts that you are helpless to explain. All you know is that his crying makes you want to cry, though you quash the urge. Instead, you slip out of bed curl yourself into Mycroft's back. Your arm dangles over his soft middle and his hand finds yours in the dark.
Sometimes you get the impression that he's said something, something important, but you can never quite remember what. Eventually the sounds of Mycroft's tears fade away and you fall asleep to the sound of his breathing. The pressure of his back expanding against your chest with the movement of his lungs is the last thing you can remember before the memory dissipates and you are left with only a handful of memory and the dim, dusty light from your candle.
As you go to return the memory, you catch the reflection of the flame bouncing off the surface of something else in the drawer. Whatever it is, you didn't put it there, but that it has shown up in the Shadow Room does not surprise you. When you reach for it, it is easy to identify: a voice recorder.
You play it once, twice, again and again until you can be certain that what you've heard is accurate. There are only five words and they taste of that night when you say them, after the voice recorder has been returned to the drawer.
He will never hurt you.
When you've found your way out again, you call Mycroft.
He sounds surprised. "And to what do I owe this pleasure? Not another favor."
"Of a sort," you say. "When I was six, you said something to me. Something about ‘him’ not hurting me. Who---"
Mycroft hangs up and does not pick up his mobile the next time you call.
In the interim, you try to piece it all together, only to have it fall apart in your hands. You sense that you are missing something obvious. It frustrates you, not knowing whether you are missing one big piece or many small pieces.
You stop eating and ask John to leave you in peace under the pretense of taking care of the case. You even say 'please', knowing that you will have to file this beside your other failures. Each day, you spend more and more time in the Shadow Room, looking for whatever it is that you missed and half-hoping that something else will appear in your chest of drawers. For a week, you do this, and realization does not dawn. There is no epiphany. Mycroft does not answer your frequent calls or allow John to act as your go-between as he has in the past.
"He will never hurt you" becomes your mantra and your madness.
When John catches you muttering it to yourself as you wait for the kettle to boil, you can hear the clock ticking. You have to figure it out soon, quickly, before you lock yourself inside the Shadow Room and forget everything else. In a rare moment of weakness, you let John fuss over you. You accept the tea, even the biscuit, but decline the offer of a sedative. As soon as he leaves (you need to eat something more substantial, he says), you roll up your sleeves and stick on the last of your nicotine patches.
Between the tea and the nicotine, it occurs to you that other things might be carried with you. That though they might not stick, they will stay as long as you stay. You bring the cigar box into the Shadow Room with you, careful not to tangle the red strings connecting these memories with so many others. You snip the threads that lead back to the worst of your resentment. The rest, you handle gently, not wanting to jolt the feelings you keep at the ends. Sentiment will only distract you.
Surrounded by miscellany and red thread, you lay your memories side by side. You can’t help but be repulsed by the disorder of your little magpie nest, but the longer you spend there, the more things begin to converge. New angles appear in old snapshots. Shadows begin to take form. Sounds and smells and sensations that you thought you had forgotten echo back at you anew.
When you were very small, Daddy had explained to you that Mycroft suffered from horrible headaches. That the pain and nausea came close to crippling him at times. Only once did you try opening the door to the room you shared with Mycroft after Daddy had laid him down for a nap. You can still hear the anger in your father’s voice over your protests that you had only wanted to comfort your big brother. For years, you have blamed him for driving this wedge between you, for making you feel like you were always underfoot, for locking you out, but seen through the lens of the last week, you feel none of what you felt before.
In its place, you find a rather curious fact. No matter how loud you screamed or how many schools you managed to get yourself expelled from, you have no memory of ever having heard Mycroft excuse himself with a migraine. The words are always your father’s. Somewhere along the timeline, the migraines simply disappear, along with Mycroft’s insomnia. Your own sleep patterns never normalize, but you have picked enough locks to know that Mycroft sleeps through the night, every night.
When these things are gone, things you have always considered to be integral parts of Mycroft’s character, you struggle to plug the holes in your sinking ship. You attack Mycroft for a sweet-tooth that grows greedier by the day, comforted by the false belief that you will never be vulnerable to something as demeaning and stupid as addiction.
In one of your more spiteful moments, you even tell him that if he goes on like this, he’ll die of a heart attack just like your father. You can still feel the sting of his knuckles on your cheek. It’s the only time Mycroft has ever struck you.
He never touches you again after that, not in anger, not in affection. Not even when you are seventeen and vomiting on the floor of St. Bart's casualty department after your first overdose. You’re sobbing and sorry and all you want is for him to reach out and hold your hand in his, but he doesn’t. You spend your next overdose alone, stuck at hospital on Christmas, trying to convince yourself that you didn’t do it to test him.
Over takeout, you ask John if he has ever hated Harry.
"Sometimes I don't know how to feel," he admits, "but she's my baby sister. I can't hate her." You pretend not to notice the pained look on his face as he adds, slowly, "Whatever this… feud is between you and Mycroft, you shouldn’t think it means he doesn’t love you. He does, even if he’s not good at showing it."
When you go back down, everything is right where you left it. You can only conclude that nothing that you have ever tried to leave in the Shadow Room before belonged there, with the exception of the one memory you cannot control. As you review what you know, you tug a few stray threads to shake down your emotional processing. Somewhere between the crisscross of jealousy and resentment and petty anger, everything falls into place.
"He will never hurt you," Mycroft had said, and you know then what he meant.
You know why he would not come out from the car at Daddy's funeral. You know why his headaches stopped after Daddy died and why you were never allowed into the room when Mycroft felt ill. With absolute lucidity, you see every gesture, every word, every instance that you have ever regarded as evidence for your father’s favoritism. Every excuse for the resentment you have harbored toward your brother. For the first time, you feel guilt for feeding Mycroft’s hatred of his body, for mocking his weakness, for antagonizing him into striking you and demanding that you never compare him to that man again.
You leave your memories as they are, scattered, and lock the door behind you. The key slides out of the knob and melts into the background. You take one more moment to sever the threads you've led inside the Shadow Room, cutting until you feel nothing, not even the satisfaction of a case solved.
A few days later, you call Mycroft and this time, you ask only for forgiveness.
Alternate Link: AO3
Word Count: 2244
Characters/Pairings: Sherlock (POV), Mycroft, OMC, background J/S
Rating: PG-13, contains non-explicit references to adult material
Summary: Sherlock keeps his memories of his father in a cigar box in his memory palace. All save one.
Warnings: Highlight here to see warnings. May be triggering: implied parent/child sexual abuse, implied incest, pedophilia, references to disordered eating and distorted body image, references to drug use and overdose, potentially disturbing imagery.
Author's Note: Originally written for this prompt at sherlockbbc-fic. Substantial edits (~500 words) have been made.
What you remember of your father can fit inside a cigar box. His preferred newspaper (the Telegraph), the sort of tobacco he put in his pipe (Gold Block), how he took his tea (extra milk, one sugar), nestled beside snapshots of memory that become real photographs in your mind palace. Though mundane, you thumb through them often enough that the edges have become worn, the glossy finish marred by your fingerprints: Daddy reading the paper at breakfast; Daddy carrying Mycroft up the stairs to sleep off a migraine; Daddy running a bath for Mycroft; Daddy tucking you both into bed and forgetting to kiss your forehead for the third night in a row.
New snapshots drift in every now and then, dragging fine, red threads behind them. You are rarely present in the frame. As you grow older, such instances are fewer and farther between. You can only suppose the rest has gone the way of the solar system and whatever social niceties public schooling attempted to instill in you, forgotten for good.
Today’s visit is prompted by a new case that bears a striking resemblance to an old case. Relief floods John’s face when you mention this, off-hand. You don’t bother to clarify that you never solved the first one.
Agitation makes you wander aimlessly down corridors you rarely bother to explore, as evinced by the bare white walls and the scant few threads that follow you as you walk past room after room, until you reach the outermost edge of your map. Behind these doors you house your ugliest feelings, your most hateful moments---everything that you keep not for pleasure or utility but for illustration. These are your weaknesses and your failures, meticulously catalogued to remind you that you are only a man and that you, too, make mistakes.
At the end of the hall lies the Shadow Room.
The first time you stumbled into it, you had immediately written it off as a glitch and emptied it. It is unusual for a single, unattached memory to sort itself, but not entirely unheard of. Fragments are more common for some sorts of memories than others. When you discovered it had not disappeared several visits later, you felt a faint stirring of unease. Nothing you’ve read mentions entire rooms that appear of their own accord, but there can be no doubt that you did not build the Shadow Room or deliberately place within it that singular, obscured memory that you have never been able to explain.
It is the only memory of your father that did not come from the cigar box. You don’t know where it came from, only that it appeared with the Shadow Room. The pictures blur and sometimes refuse to stay still. Strange objects cast shadows everywhere, rippling in your hands and breathing out smells of pipe tobacco and something astringent you’ve never managed to identify. Deleted, it regenerates. Relocated, it returns to the only room you have ever seen without the spider-webbing of emotional data cluttering the corners. Any threads that follow you in vanish upon departure. Nothing else will stick there.
There is little reason to idle once you review the case you came for, but something makes you twist the long, brass key you keep stuck in the doorknob of the Shadow Room. The room is cold, as it always is, and unlit. From your pocket, you pull out a candle to light your way to the small chest of drawers that sits in the center.
Somewhere a child is crying. The sound grows louder as you approach, but remains far away. Some memories imprint with smells and sounds, even tastes. Though only an echo, you find yourself looking for the source of the noise.
By the time you settle with the memory on your lap, the cries have faded. You close your eyes and let the memory pull you under.
Since childhood, you have been a poor sleeper. It's in the blood, Mummy said. You could set your watch by Mycroft's insomnia. After years of sharing a room, you have learned to filter out the sounds of him waking, but on the night of the memory, the creak of the door opens your eyes. Not wanting to give yourself away, you lie still and watchful in your bed. Light shines in from the hall and in the smudges of darkness you detect the outline of your father, leading Mycroft by the shoulders, as if he’s caught your brother sleepwalking. As the sound of Daddy's footsteps fades in a slow decrescendo, you hear the original source of the echo: Mycroft, crying.
Even Mycroft must cry sometimes, you reason. After all, you cry when you've skinned your knee on the pavement or when you're so saturated by stimulation that the slightest whisper can bring you to tears. Neither of these sounds anything like what Mycroft is doing in furtive, hiccupping bursts that you are helpless to explain. All you know is that his crying makes you want to cry, though you quash the urge. Instead, you slip out of bed curl yourself into Mycroft's back. Your arm dangles over his soft middle and his hand finds yours in the dark.
Sometimes you get the impression that he's said something, something important, but you can never quite remember what. Eventually the sounds of Mycroft's tears fade away and you fall asleep to the sound of his breathing. The pressure of his back expanding against your chest with the movement of his lungs is the last thing you can remember before the memory dissipates and you are left with only a handful of memory and the dim, dusty light from your candle.
As you go to return the memory, you catch the reflection of the flame bouncing off the surface of something else in the drawer. Whatever it is, you didn't put it there, but that it has shown up in the Shadow Room does not surprise you. When you reach for it, it is easy to identify: a voice recorder.
You play it once, twice, again and again until you can be certain that what you've heard is accurate. There are only five words and they taste of that night when you say them, after the voice recorder has been returned to the drawer.
He will never hurt you.
When you've found your way out again, you call Mycroft.
He sounds surprised. "And to what do I owe this pleasure? Not another favor."
"Of a sort," you say. "When I was six, you said something to me. Something about ‘him’ not hurting me. Who---"
Mycroft hangs up and does not pick up his mobile the next time you call.
In the interim, you try to piece it all together, only to have it fall apart in your hands. You sense that you are missing something obvious. It frustrates you, not knowing whether you are missing one big piece or many small pieces.
You stop eating and ask John to leave you in peace under the pretense of taking care of the case. You even say 'please', knowing that you will have to file this beside your other failures. Each day, you spend more and more time in the Shadow Room, looking for whatever it is that you missed and half-hoping that something else will appear in your chest of drawers. For a week, you do this, and realization does not dawn. There is no epiphany. Mycroft does not answer your frequent calls or allow John to act as your go-between as he has in the past.
"He will never hurt you" becomes your mantra and your madness.
When John catches you muttering it to yourself as you wait for the kettle to boil, you can hear the clock ticking. You have to figure it out soon, quickly, before you lock yourself inside the Shadow Room and forget everything else. In a rare moment of weakness, you let John fuss over you. You accept the tea, even the biscuit, but decline the offer of a sedative. As soon as he leaves (you need to eat something more substantial, he says), you roll up your sleeves and stick on the last of your nicotine patches.
Between the tea and the nicotine, it occurs to you that other things might be carried with you. That though they might not stick, they will stay as long as you stay. You bring the cigar box into the Shadow Room with you, careful not to tangle the red strings connecting these memories with so many others. You snip the threads that lead back to the worst of your resentment. The rest, you handle gently, not wanting to jolt the feelings you keep at the ends. Sentiment will only distract you.
Surrounded by miscellany and red thread, you lay your memories side by side. You can’t help but be repulsed by the disorder of your little magpie nest, but the longer you spend there, the more things begin to converge. New angles appear in old snapshots. Shadows begin to take form. Sounds and smells and sensations that you thought you had forgotten echo back at you anew.
When you were very small, Daddy had explained to you that Mycroft suffered from horrible headaches. That the pain and nausea came close to crippling him at times. Only once did you try opening the door to the room you shared with Mycroft after Daddy had laid him down for a nap. You can still hear the anger in your father’s voice over your protests that you had only wanted to comfort your big brother. For years, you have blamed him for driving this wedge between you, for making you feel like you were always underfoot, for locking you out, but seen through the lens of the last week, you feel none of what you felt before.
In its place, you find a rather curious fact. No matter how loud you screamed or how many schools you managed to get yourself expelled from, you have no memory of ever having heard Mycroft excuse himself with a migraine. The words are always your father’s. Somewhere along the timeline, the migraines simply disappear, along with Mycroft’s insomnia. Your own sleep patterns never normalize, but you have picked enough locks to know that Mycroft sleeps through the night, every night.
When these things are gone, things you have always considered to be integral parts of Mycroft’s character, you struggle to plug the holes in your sinking ship. You attack Mycroft for a sweet-tooth that grows greedier by the day, comforted by the false belief that you will never be vulnerable to something as demeaning and stupid as addiction.
In one of your more spiteful moments, you even tell him that if he goes on like this, he’ll die of a heart attack just like your father. You can still feel the sting of his knuckles on your cheek. It’s the only time Mycroft has ever struck you.
He never touches you again after that, not in anger, not in affection. Not even when you are seventeen and vomiting on the floor of St. Bart's casualty department after your first overdose. You’re sobbing and sorry and all you want is for him to reach out and hold your hand in his, but he doesn’t. You spend your next overdose alone, stuck at hospital on Christmas, trying to convince yourself that you didn’t do it to test him.
Over takeout, you ask John if he has ever hated Harry.
"Sometimes I don't know how to feel," he admits, "but she's my baby sister. I can't hate her." You pretend not to notice the pained look on his face as he adds, slowly, "Whatever this… feud is between you and Mycroft, you shouldn’t think it means he doesn’t love you. He does, even if he’s not good at showing it."
When you go back down, everything is right where you left it. You can only conclude that nothing that you have ever tried to leave in the Shadow Room before belonged there, with the exception of the one memory you cannot control. As you review what you know, you tug a few stray threads to shake down your emotional processing. Somewhere between the crisscross of jealousy and resentment and petty anger, everything falls into place.
"He will never hurt you," Mycroft had said, and you know then what he meant.
You know why he would not come out from the car at Daddy's funeral. You know why his headaches stopped after Daddy died and why you were never allowed into the room when Mycroft felt ill. With absolute lucidity, you see every gesture, every word, every instance that you have ever regarded as evidence for your father’s favoritism. Every excuse for the resentment you have harbored toward your brother. For the first time, you feel guilt for feeding Mycroft’s hatred of his body, for mocking his weakness, for antagonizing him into striking you and demanding that you never compare him to that man again.
You leave your memories as they are, scattered, and lock the door behind you. The key slides out of the knob and melts into the background. You take one more moment to sever the threads you've led inside the Shadow Room, cutting until you feel nothing, not even the satisfaction of a case solved.
A few days later, you call Mycroft and this time, you ask only for forgiveness.