Fic: A Good Man Pt 2
Warnings etc found in Part One
A Good Man
Part Two
I had drifted off again when the phone finally rang. Christ, I thought, when all this is over I’m going to need a coma to recover. It was disorienting, waking up in the dim light, freezing, numb and wet, with something warm in my arms and someone’s hair in my face. I squeezed whoever I was holding in brief panic and heard his waking breath.
Sherlock.
Mycroft was calling. I used my right hand to fish out the phone, the ringing was hideous in the quiet.
“Finally!” I grumbled into the receiver.
“I’ve sent a car, it’s waiting for you,” no apologies forthcoming.
“How did you find us?”
“Your imagination is sadly predictable, Dr. Watson. We are fortunate Lestrade is on our side or else Gregson would have tracked you down as well. The inspector fed his colleague a red herring and is investigating the dead man as we speak. Get in the car.” he hung up. I put the phone back in my pocket and started to unfold myself. Sherlock was not immediately cooperative.
“Come on,” I huffed at him. “We need out of this cold and I can’t bloody carry you all the way.” He stood up and waited for me, eyes focused far away. I led him by the hand again, on my screaming feet (at least the pain meant there was no frostbite) out of the tunnels and to the closest road. A black car was idling on the street. We got in the back and the driver pulled away without a word.
I don’t know where I expected to be taken. Some abandoned but sufficiently warm ware house on the outskirts of London. But when we stopped we were in a back street parallel to Pall Mall. The driver directed us through a back door, where Mycroft himself was sitting and rubbing his temples on a window seat. He stood quickly when we entered.
“Ah, there you are. Bring him upstairs, it’s warmer.”
“Housing fugatives, Mycroft? That can’t be healthy for a government official.” Mycroft smirked at me, the Holmes family smirk.
“Consider me a government unofficial then. I almost never appear in the official channels unless I’m budgeting.” He turned and led us up a carpeted flight of stairs. “And for better or worse, Sherlock is my brother. I’ve bent the law more than once on his account.” The carpet was a soft burgundy color. All of the furniture was a deep, rich, brown. The library was a place I would like to visit on a more leisurely basis, if occasioned. I don’t know if Mycroft is as voracious a reader as his collection suggests or if he simply likes the way the books fill the walls.
Mycroft settled us in and gave us dry clothes to wear. Sherlock was a ghost against the deep red of the settee we put him on. He refused any offer of drink except for the brandy I order on him and of that he would only take two sips. He would not look me in the eye, but it appeared he was done fighting. Mycroft regarded him thoughtfully from his own chair by the fire.
“Is there anything I can get for you, Sherlock?” he asked. Sherlock waved his hand in a vague way, weakly, from beneath the blanket I had covered him with. Mycroft glanced at me with a tragic face. In the next few minutes Sherlock either fell asleep from exhaustion or pretended to in order to avoid us for a while longer.
A maid appeared in the doorway and Mycroft followed her out. I stayed, thinking about Sherlock and beginning to drift gently myself, when I heard a male voice boom from downstairs.
“You’re instincts are better than Sherlock’s, Mr. Holmes! You couldn’t have been more accurate if you’d drawn me a bloody map!” It was Lestrade, I realized when the world swam wearily back to me. I heard Mycroft’s softer response in return.
If Lestrade was calling, then he had found the answer to Sherlock’s murder. His voice didn’t suggest the worst. My body begged me to slump back into the warmed cushion, but I had to know. I yanked myself from the chair and paused only once in the doorway to wonder about the wisdom of leaving Sherlock alone. Mycroft would not have anything dangerous lying about, I decided in the end. And I would only be down the stairs.
I only actually made it half way. My feet were very quiet on the carpet with no more than my borrowed socks on my feet. I rounded to the top of the staircase meaning to rush down and demand Lestrade repeat his findings for me. Mycroft’s tone stopped me. It was private and uncertain. I had stumbled into a strange moment.
Turning around would have been the decent thing to do. Instead I crouched low on the stair, putting myself in the shadow of the banister, and listened over the sound of my own breathing.
“None of this ‘Mr. Holmes’, inspector. If we’re going to be co-conspirators, Mycroft will do.” I heard Mycroft’s halting sentence. Lestrade answered in an equally odd voice. Two fish out of the sea.
“Geoffrey, then. Oh, thank you.”
“I assume it’s the least you need.”
A short silence, then I heard Lestrade cough.
“My God, if I’d known you were giving me the Queen’s brandy I wouldn’t have had it so fast.” The crystal sound of pouring liquor and Mycroft’s dark chuckle. Many things about Mycroft were dark. But they were also sturdy.
A long, agonizing silence.
“I want you to know that I appreciate the difficulty of the choice you made. And I’m grateful for it.” Mycroft’s voice. One of them sat down. “Thank you.”
“I’m not sorry,” Lestrade said quickly, then, as if realizing that wasn’t quite the proper response: “and it was no choice, really.”
“It was no choice to trust, in a second, a sociopath and his misanthropic older brother?” Mycroft was either amused or in disbelief.
“I’m no expert, of course, but I would say that Sherlock’s…funny ways, aren’t the result of social ineptitude.”
“No indeed.”
“…How is he?”
I went back to the room, and to Sherlock, before Mycroft could answer. I was afraid to hear what he had to say.
Lestrade must have stayed talking for some time because I fell asleep before Mycroft returned. I wouldn’t have made the mistake again if we’d been anywhere else, but I assumed Mycroft had everything in hand. And I assumed Sherlock was done punishing me.
In the end, I never learned the truth about the old man from Lestrade at all. I learned it from Sherlock, who was sitting in the light of the rising sun fiddling with a vile of morphine and a needle when I woke. His scarf was wrapped around his upper arm and his forearm was bared. The steep angle of the light threw his veins into contrast, the needle was held comfortably, familiarly, in his right hand.
I sat upright with a strangled cry. Sherlock looked up at me with a drawn face and red eyes, his pupils were normal.
“Don’t worry,” he set the needle on the floor and leaned back. “I’m a coward after all.” He sounded so much like his old self in that moment, so derisive. And so much unlike he had ever sounded, turning his scathing criticism in on himself.
“Sherlock,” I was up and gripping his shoulders, beside him on the settee. “Whatever else is true, that is not.”
“Stop! Lying!” he commanded. “What else do you call a man who hides from everything? Who hides from himself? I am a hypocrite, too. How often have I accused you of being biased to the facts?”
“No. Cowards don’t chase down assassins in the dark. Or battle evil masterminds. Or do any of the very insane things you do on a regular basis.”
“Hah! Assassins! Masterminds! Death, pain. All threats to the body. What is the body? Nothing. I risk, nothing.”
“You risk everything.” I hissed at him. “And if you believed otherwise you would have vanished to somewhere else by now.” He was drained suddenly, in the golden light of the morning. Emptied like a glass tipped over. He slumped forward into himself, cradling his head in his hands. He peered at me from behind the veil of his fingers.
“Why are you still here, John?”
“Why are you still trying to drive me away?” I returned.
“Even if you stay,” he said softly “you will wait forever for me to change. I won’t.”
“I’m not asking.”
He nodded, and turned to look behind him at the rising sun. A day without rain was rising in London. It was a day for walks and shopping. It was a day to drink tea with the windows open, or to take lunch in an open bistro. It was going to be a beautiful day. For anyone who stood in the right spot nothing evil could possible happen today. Nothing wrong. The world would be at peace.
“He was a murderer and a rapist. Young girls. Julie Wilcox, the girl who was taken from her mother’s van near Picadilly two weeks ago, was not his first victim.”
It was one long blank second before I found his meaning. My stomach twisted in rage and revulsion. The details came together in my memory, little things blooming into grand and horrible significance. The bent wire of his glasses.
“The tear in his sweater and the scratches on his neck.”
Sherlock nodded.
I left my seat and crossed the room to yank the curtains together. I shut out the glorious, lying morning.
Sherlock lay down on the settee and I scooped up the morphine and the syringe. I would dispose of them downstairs.
“You should get some sleep if you can,” I said and turned to leave. The needle was freezing in my hand. I wanted it gone. I had doubts that morphine had been his drug of choice as an addict. And the volume in the syringe was suggestive. Sherlock hadn’t been looking for a high.
“I hate it, you know.” His voice stopped me in the doorway, low and singsong.
“What’s that?”
“Being Sherlock Holmes, ‘The Great Detective’. I hate seeing what I see. I hate knowing everyone’s dirty little secrets.”
“No you don’t,” I argued. “You hate that the things you see when you look are dirty. You hate that humanity can fool everyone but you.”
“You may be right,” he said, and dropped off to sleep.
I folded the syringe and the morphine into a wad of paper towels and smashed them to bits under my foot before throwing the shards away. Where had he found them? Where was Mycroft to stop him?
Where was Mycroft at all?
“At the office,” he told me later. “It would be a mistake to vary my routine while breaking the law as I am. There is already suspicion of my involvement I’m sure. Changing my schedule would only draw attention. How is Sherlock?”
“He’s been sleeping for hours now. I don’t think he’s better, necessarily. But he spoke to me at least. Told me about the man he killed.”
“A particularly nasty specimen of our species, Lestrade informed me.”
“And the law?”
“Sherlock’s a hero, as far as the media will be concerned. He prevented a second abduction. Lestrade’s men also found a concealed weapon on the body. Obviously Sherlock saw it and believed the man was reaching for his gun and fired first.”
I thought about the thin material of that beige sweater. It couldn’t have concealed a breadknife.
“The gun was unregistered, of course,” Mycroft added without a hint of insincerity.
“Of course,” I agreed.
“You are both free to return home as soon as he wakes.” He paused. “Or you may stay, if you wish,” he added softly. I had a funny vision of Mycroft twenty years ago when he was nothing bigger than a big brother.
“What happened between you and Sherlock?” I asked before I could think not to. Mycroft regarded me in surprise. There was a grandfather clock that ticked behind him.
“There is something extraordinary about the “ordinary” people Sherlock chooses to surround himself with. Clever in unexpected ways, both of you.”
“Both of us?” He was handing me a very full glass of very expensive brandy. I allowed myself to be diverted temporarily out of gratitude. The brandy went down like fire and silk.
“Lestrade.” Mycroft clarified, “I wouldn’t call you sensitive, exactly, intuitive is a better word. Very intuitive. Especially in manners concerning my brother. For which I am grateful.”
“I seem to have done little good for him lately.” Sleeping, Sherlock was long worn out lines and shadows on the settee upstairs.
“You’ve done him more good than I have been able to in these past years,” Mycroft assured me. He poured a third glass of brandy and set it on the server. “This isn’t his first breakdown, John. They come irregularly, whenever he works himself too hard for too long. In the past he turned to chemical…solutions.”
“He didn’t turn to me. I had to kidnap him.”
“But he didn’t disappear.” I nodded. And then I was done with wondering.
“What happened to him that you couldn’t stop?” I asked. “He’s up there making it out like he’s suffering because he can see all the evils of the world. Like all of this has been about existential angst. I don’t doubt it’s difficult but…”
“But..” Mycroft echoed. “It wasn’t something I couldn’t stop, it was something I did stop, and I fancy he hates me for it. Quite rightly. Come in!” he shouted. I jumped and nearly sloshed expensive brandy all over myself. The door to the parlor swung open. I hadn’t heard a knock. Lestrade walked in.
“Mr. Hol...er..Mycroft. John.” Lestrade nodded his head. “The media is in a frenzy and the charges are dropped. Donovan and Anderson have gone home to drink away their disappointment.”
“And you are here,” Mycroft smiled, “in the last house where you have no secrets.” I thought it was a strange thing to say. He handed Lestrade the third glass. Lestrade laughed.
“Don’t go imagining I gave up all that much.” he said. “My own mother hasn’t known me since I was twelve.”
“What on earth did you do when you were twelve that you couldn’t tell your mother?” I asked.
“Saw my neighbor strangle his wife. She would have been horrified if she’d known. My mother has the constitution of a cream puff for some things. I begged for hours before I convinced the local constable to keep it quiet,” all said without hesitation.
“You know you’re trusting the second most dangerous man in London with your secrets,” I said to Lestrade. He shrugged.
“Seems he would know them either way. Trusting him saves the trouble.” . I looked at Mycroft, who was smiling warmly into his drink. I felt bizarrely like a young man who had walked in on his parents having an intimate moment. “How is Sherlock?” he asked me.
“He’s speaking to me again. But I don’t…I don’t really know what to do for him.”
“You’re under informed,” said Mycroft. I understood it to mean that Lestrade was to be privy to this information as well. It’s only right, I reasoned. He’d risked his entire career for Sherlock. More.
The step didn’t creak. And the hallway was dark so there couldn’t have been a shadow to notice. I only suddenly knew to glance up, to lean back just enough to see between a gap in the rails of the banister to the top step, where I had overheard a conversation the night before. Sherlock was sitting there, pale faced, in a red dressing gown that was too big for him. He was looking at me. He was listening. His face told me if I didn’t stop it, something was about to break.
I took a large swallow of my brandy and let Mycroft have his say. Sherlock would forgive me or he wouldn’t.
Mycroft looked at his brandy and at Lestrade, not at me. I had given it away somehow. But we were in mutual agreement. Get it all out in the open, like a deck of falling cards.
“It was our father. We came from some money, in our childhood. Our father was a retired army colonel and the enterprising business type; a gambler. Not in cards or games, bigger stakes, business risks. When Sherlock was ten the money began to run out. Mother and Father never said anything, but we were clever enough to notice.” He gave Lestrade an almost self deprecating smile. “Father started disappearing for months at a time. He would leave and come back with instruments and chocolates from Spain, for Sherlock and myself.”
“In 1979 El Salvador broke out in a civil war that lasted for thirteen years. It hardly made the press here for the simple reason that we were not really involved. But my father had friends in the Salvadorian government. And when the Liberation movement began, he threw in with those friends and used his influence to get them…supplies they would not normally have had access to.
“If you have heard anything of the war, you’ve heard of the atrocities committed by that government. Concentration camps were set up to house captured liberals. Children were murdered for sport by government soldiers. Women were raped. On a day to day basis this went on. All under the eyes of watchful colonels. My father was one.
“He was not only guilty of inaction, but he supported the camps with funds. He condoned them. Sherlock discovered it.” Mycroft paused and took a large sip of his brandy. There was a small tremor, just a tiny one, in the line of his jaw.
“He wanted to tell Mother. He wanted to expose Father publicly to the British officials so they could have no choice but to act. I stopped him. Our mother was not a weak woman, much to the contrary, but she loved our Father and it would have broken her heart. I told Mother a lie about Sherlock to get them both out of the house. A year or so before Sherlock had fallen sideways through a window on the second floor and cut his arm badly. I told Mother that Sherlock and I had broken the window on purpose that day and fabricated the story of him falling through it so she wouldn’t know that the wound was intentional. I told her Sherlock had tried to kill himself and I was afraid he was thinking of making another attempt. I had never lied to her before, about anything, she had no reason to disbelieve me now and she acted exactly as I knew she would. Mother took Sherlock out for a walk on the grounds, to the bee hives-he loved to watch the bees-where she could talk with him safely in private.
“It was an unforgivable lie in and of itself. Sherlock’s animosity towards me is more than understandable.
“I was alone in the house, by design, when Father came home. I cornered him in his study and informed him that Sherlock and I knew what he was doing and that we would expose him if he didn’t get out. I commanded him to lie to Mother. I told him never to contact us for anything.
“Depraved though he undoubtedly was, neither I nor Sherlock could be bribed or cowed by false threats, and even he wouldn’t act violently against his children. He and Mother had a nasty row that night, and he was gone.”
“Where did he go?” I asked.
“Presumably back to El Salvador,” Mycroft answered. I said nothing further but he saw the consternation anyway, or anticipated it. “Yes, Dr. Watson, back to El Salvador, where he could continue his crimes against humanity.”
“You had another reason for letting him go,” said Lestrade. It wasn’t a question.
“The politics,” Mycroft admitted. “Exposure of my Father would have caused a national scandal, since his influence was working on official channels, which involved our government to a certain degree. With the government as it was at that time it would have lead to a war. I had three options. I could allow my father to continue supplying arms to El Salvadore. I could begin a war that would cost still more lives. Or I could… kill the man. I took the only course I could possibly live with. But it was only the lesser of several evils, and has cost me many sleepless nights since.” He began drinking his brandy and fell silent. Lestrade stared at the molding along the wall, stricken. I stared at Sherlock, waiting.
Minutes went by. Sherlock was too much in shadow for me to really see his face, but I could tell he was struggling with something.
“Three Brutus’s,” he murmured darkly, calling attention to himself, “conspiring together over drinks and childhood stories.”
“We’re hardly planning to stab you in the back, Sherlock.” I said. I was light in the head. My glass was empty. Mycroft’s brandy was excellent. I thought Sherlock could probably use some.
“You would like some brandy with your co-conspirators, Sherlock?” asked Mycroft, pointedly reminding Sherlock that we were on his side. Lying for him.
“I wouldn’t,” he answered shortly. “I would like to go home. I understand that’s permissible now?” He wasn’t forgiving his brother today.
“The numbers back me up, Sherlock,” Mycroft said softly, in the voice of a man who has said the same thing many times before without a hope of being heard.
Sherlock ignored his brother and looked instead at me.
“Home,” he commanded. I shook the hands of Mycroft and Lestrade, thanking them. I noticed, as I walked out, that they were standing close together in a big room. As the door swung closed I saw Lestrade put a hand on Mycroft’s arm.
And then home we went. Sherlock left without a backward glance at his worried brother.
Baker Street was freezing. The gas had been turned off all night and morning. I cranked it up. Sherlock took a shower. I had tea ready for him when he reemerged. His hair was a tousled wet mess. He had put on clean pajamas and his gray dressing gown. He didn’t lock himself in his room as I’d been dreading, but dropped onto the couch and sipped his tea.
“It was the logical thing to do,” I said, wasting no time. I was tired and feeling sick. I was all out of patience. “What other choice did Mycroft have?”
“He had the choice to give others the choice,” Sherlock answered slowly. “He made a decision for the entire family, for the entire country, when he let my father go.”
“The world is unfair, and it upsets you,” I said irritably, unreasonably. I needn’t have been so short with him. He had given up. He cracked open, finally, slamming his hand against the coffee table.
“No!” he shouted at me. “The world is idiotic and emotional and it upsets me! The world kills itself for the sake of retaining its own stupidity, and it bloody upsets me! People aren’t all morons, John, they’re lazy. They defer to systems that only work properly forty percent of the time and ignore the massive margin of error for their own convenience! And intelligent people like Mycroft, like myself, have to make up for those errors! People have to die for those errors! Murder for the sake of leisure,” he snarled this last part, like a kicked dog back into a corner.
I had no words for him. Not right away. He had to sit through ninety seconds of silence while I reeled.
Imagine you are standing on a hill looking down on the surface of a high plateau. Below you are ten million people. Ninety percent of them are walking around blindfolded, stumbling, unaware every second of their lives where they are in relation to the edge. Ten percent are sitting in arm chairs, conversing, with their hands held up to the sides of their faces so they can’t see the others falling and dying. The people who are blindfolded are smiling, and chatting, and falling in love. They don’t complain when their mothers trip over the side, when their sons are bumped off by jostling shoulders. They smile. They laugh. You call warnings down to them. You tell them to watch their steps, to take off the blindfolds, it only makes sense.
They call you a psychopath. They hate you.
I rubbed my tired eyes, tight in the chest.
“Sherlock, what do you need?” I had to know.
“I require nothing, at the moment, John,” cold as winter.
“What do you want? What can I give you?” I was asking for my sake more than for his. He had managed without me his whole life. He could get through alone again, if he was careful with the drugs. But I couldn’t bear that thought. I couldn’t think of him strung out in some hotel. So I pushed. I was insistent. I crouched before him, inches away, holding myself up with the couch cushion below his knees. “Sherlock…”
“I don’t want your forgiveness, John,” he said. “And I won’t apologize. I don’t want to change.”
“What do you want, damn it! What?” I flipped the coffee table over and kicked it. I was beyond reason. I only wanted to help and he was being an idiot.
He stared at me like I was an undiscovered species.
“You,” he said softly, “have the unparalleled ability to continually surprise me.” He fisted his fingers into my lapels and hauled me into him, crushing my mouth with his. I was out of breath already with frustration, the kiss made my vision darken I was so dizzy. I closed my eyes to make the room stop spinning. I wrapped my hand around the back of his head so he couldn’t pull away; gasping the air I needed from his mouth and through my nose.
We scrambled madly to fit ourselves comfortably onto the sofa. Layering was our only option really, so I sat on him, pinned him down by the shoulders with my hands. He was warm beneath me, and yielding. He held onto me like a drowning man. I kissed him until I tasted warm salt, then I broke away and gasped his name.
He wasn’t crying exactly, but his voice was wrecked and tears were spilling over his thin cheeks. I saw what a mess he was.
“What-?”
“I lied,” he choked. “I wish you would forgive me. Even if I don’t change-even if I can’t-.”
I kissed him again to bring back the silence.
“Do your worst,” I told him. He laughed. It was a jagged, heartfelt thing, unlike any sound I’d heard from him before. His hands came up to my face, long cool fingers and hot palms.
“I have done,” he said, and pulled me down.
We spent two nights in Baker Street and then went back to Poldhu Bay and the case of the murdered family of Tregennis. Wrapping all the pieces back together was the work of an afternoon. Dr. Leon Sterndale was an amateur expert in the exotic poisons used by African tribes. He had brought certain samples back, many of which were psychoactive. Among them was Radix Pedis Diabolia; 'Devil’s Foot Root’. It takes a powder form, but if combusted turns into a poisonous gas that is often deadly if inhaled, causing it’s victims to hallucinate horrors in their final moments. It also works on the lungs to deprive the brain of oxygen, so those unlucky enough to survive prolonged exposure suffer massive and permanent damage. Mortimer Tregennis had learned of the drug from Dr. Sterndale through a casual, but unlucky, conversation. He stole a discreet quantity and used it to kill his sister and drive his brothers mad.
It was for money.
Dr. Sterndale, secretly engaged to Brenda Tredannick, had recognized the poison and known that it could have only been Mortimer. He took a most fitting revenge. He was long gone back to Africa by the time we returned. Sherlock was not particularly upset by it, and I can’t say I minded myself.
Mycroft called me in the evening to ask after Sherlock. I was unsurprised to hear Lestrade’s gruff voice in the background.
I…I think that must be the end. Yes. That’s everything.
Obviously I can never publish this account. I don’t know what to do with it, actually.
xXx
“Delete it,” said Sherlock’s satin voice in John’s ear. His lips brushed gently at the delicate skin there. “It’s done its job. You feel better. I can tell by the set of your shoulders and the shake in your left hand. It only trembles when you are feeling relieved.” He nipped at the offending appendage. “And I’d rather not leave fodder for the blackmailers.”
“It’s password protected, Sherlock.”
“It would be safer stuffed in a sock. Erase it.”
xXx
from the personal blog of John H. Watson
March 29th, 2013. Last saved: 3:26 A.M.
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