Fic for marta_bee: Trimūrti
Jun. 1st, 2014 12:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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holmesticeTitle: Trimūrti
Recipient:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
marta_bee
Author: hitlikehammers
Characters/Pairings: Mycroft Holmes, Sherlock Holmes, Original Holmes Sibling, Mary Morstan, John Watson; John/Sherlock
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 3,543
Warnings: Brief References to Mental Health Issues/Mood Disorders/Self-Harm
Summary: This is the story of what happened to “The Other One.”
Notes:marta_bee, I did my utmost to give you an array of what you were looking for: Mycroft (which was so exciting, because I love writing Mycroft), a bit of John/Sherlock, some philosophy, some theology, some ethics, and some speculation on the character of Mary Morstan. I do hope it’s to your liking.
All theological references made herein are made loosely and with much creative license; no disrespect is meant toward any tradition, nor is this intended to be a faithful representation of any canonical/accepted aspect of said tradition(s).
Moreover: no disrespect meant to Alexandre Dumas ;)
As children, the only thing they had in common was a love for their mother’s book collection.
Between them, they’d read aloud, argued over tomes, bickered amongst themselves as to which threesome they best resembled.
The Three Musketeers—no, Mycroft had shaken his head. Dumas is so pedestrian, he’d scolded, and the issues was never raised again.
The Brothers Gibb—Mycroft had thwacked his brother’s ear at the suggestion, much to Sherlock’s amusement, as Stayin’ Alive blared hatefully across the radio-waves.
No, Mycroft rather thought a different triad suited the Holmes children.
Sherlock, the Creator: always piecing together, always observing, always seeking something new.
Mycroft, the Preserver: ever watchful, ever willing to protect at any cost. Even if that cost itself was pain.
And the youngest of them, the tiny dancer flitting around the room with stray weeds from the garden threaded through her hair: Marycella, the Transformer. She changed everything, calmed Sherlock’s frenetics, softened Mycroft’s points.
The Trimūrti. Ever balanced, ever volatile, ever powerful.
Ever present.
In hindsight, Mycroft should have realised that Transformation was more than mere change, that Shiva did more than oversee the seasons and the tides of all that is as they transition, as being itself waxes and wanes. Mycroft should have seen what was to come.
He comforts himself with the patient reminder that he was young. He was young.
They were all so very young.
It’s a hollow comfort, though; it barely suits.
Because the Holmes’ were never young. Not really.
__________________________
She’s seven, and she’s afraid of her eldest brother.
She’s eight, and she’s Sherlock’s second shadow.
She’s nine, and Mycroft buys her a French Bulldog, because Redbeard’s gone deaf, is going blind, and he is Sherlock’s, and Sherlock is a creator: he will make something of the loss, when it comes.
It endears her to him some, but not much. Sherlock is still her everything.
She’s eleven-and-a-half, and they find the dead mourning doves. They blame Sherlock, tell him it’s high time to have grown out of this nonsense, ask him what kind of example he intends to set for his sister.
Cella says nothing.
She’s twelve when the dead things grow bigger, the bloodstains grow larger. They blame Sherlock, tell him they’re sending him away for a while, for his protection; for Marycella’s protection, too.
Cella sobs, and no one notices that the last of the decimated carcasses they come across are fresher than Sherlock’s hands could have caused.
__________________________
She’s sixteen when they find her in her room. When they find her with the blood on her hands. When they find her with the etchings in her flesh and the penknife in her hands and the strips of her own skin hanging from the blade. She’s sixteen, and she doesn’t cry, doesn’t flinch as the metal pierces, traces, draws out the red.
She’s sixteen when she singes her bedclothes.
She’s sixteen and she smells of smoke, and her eyes are too wide, too bruised around the rims.
She’s sixteen, and Mycroft has power, now.
Mycroft has power, and when they send her away like they sent Sherlock away, Mycroft stares at the conch he keeps at his bedside and wonders what power means; wonders what use power serves if it can’t stop this.
__________________________
Mycroft is the Preserver. Mycroft is the Protector.
So when he sits beside Sherlock’s bed and prays that his brother’s heart keeps beating, keeps being as stubborn, as foolish as the rest of him and just keeps beating—as he prays that Sherlock’s body doesn’t give in to the horrors with which he’s filled its veins, Mycroft knows that he’s been sleeping, he’s been sleeping the great, long sleep on the cosmic ocean: reflective, watching, complacent.
Blind.
All blind and all deaf and Sherlock did not create from the last loss heralded by those failings.
Mycroft grips his brother’s limp hand and vows: never again.
Never again.
__________________________
He failed, with Sherlock. He failed to see how to harness, how to channel Sherlock’s talents, Sherlock’s energies in a way that was sustainable, that would sustain the man himself and all he contains.
Never let it be said that Mycroft Holmes fails to learn from his mistakes.
His superiors are skeptical. She’s young, so young.
But the Holmes’ have never been young.
So Mycroft shows them what she can do, shows them her gifts, and something in his chest grows warm and sore when he sees the fire in her eyes: so vibrant, so very much alive.
She’s sent on her first assignment the week before her nineteenth birthday.
They gather at Mummy and Daddy’s for the day itself, Sherlock fresh from his third stint in rehab, Mycroft in the middle brokering a hostage exchange in Taiwan. They eat chocolate cake. He’s never seen Cella look so peaceful, so perfectly at ease.
Transformed, as she should. Transformed through destruction. The two in perfect equity.
Mycroft allows himself a second slice of cake.
__________________________
There are years, good years, that pass. Sherlock relapses, but never for long: he begins to take cases, and there’s a Detective Inspector that knows how to maintain the proper tension, the necessary lax and give. Sherlock relapses, but he creates.
There is more creation than there is waste.
Cella is a more valuable asset than even Mycroft could have predicted. By the time Mycroft has risen through the ranks, by the time Mycroft is no longer congratulated for his foresight in recruiting her but revered, Cella has helped shape the close of the twentieth century, has neutralised more threats than Mycroft can rightly count.
There is stronger transformation than destruction.
All is well.
__________________________
By the time it breaks, by the time it all comes crashing down, Mycroft has risen to a position where it’s inconvenient, professionally-speaking, but not devastating.
By the time it comes apart, by the time it rains down upon him, it is devastating in every other way, and Mycroft thinks, of course.
The two in perfect equity.
As it should always rightly be.
__________________________
It’s not that Cella fails in her assignment. It’s not that Cella falters in executing the mission.
It’s that collateral damage is oftentimes a given, but this.
This.
This is not the work of an asset.
This is the work of a Destroyer.
There is no transformation, here.
The charges that she faces are dire. The punishments, far worse.
And Mycroft is trusted. Mycroft has proven himself. Mycroft pleads the case to handle the issue himself, to spill whatever necessary blood on his own hands, to join both siblings in the red, the red, the red.
Mycroft wants to see justice done, wants to account, to atone for what he could not predict, could not foresee.
And Mycroft is trusted.
So Mycroft delivers the verdict. Mycroft’s swings the killing blow.
__________________________
But Mycroft is a Preserver.
He needs to protect.
There is no question to anyone who looks, to anyone who asks or seeks: there is no question.
Marycella Alyssia Guilianna Rienette Anise Holmes meets her earned demise.
Mycroft does not mourn. He cannot mourn.
Marycella Alyssia Guilianna Rienette Anise Holmes is dead.
Mycroft does not know any different.
He cannot know any different.
__________________________
It’s his assistant—charming woman, sharp-witted and reliable.
Trustworthy. Trustworthy in a way Mycroft isn’t, in a way Mycroft is incapable of mastering by necessity, by the very function of his nature.
It’s his assistant with the changeable names—charming, that, about the woman—that takes care of it.
Mycroft makes it clear that there can be no trace, that there can be no end left loose.
Mycroft makes it clear that no expense is to be spared; that no corner shall be cut.
Mycroft makes it clearest of all that he cannot know of any of it. Not what happens. Not what’s done. Not where and when or why.
He can know nothing.
That’s how he learns that he can count on Anthea.
She does the things he cannot know.
She does what he needs doing, so that he can protect.
__________________________
Their parents cry, when he tells them she’s gone. Sherlock’s hands twitch, and his eyes shine, and he says nothing.
And if he has to hurt to protect, to maintain, then he serves his aim, he fulfils his purpose.
But only by halves.
__________________________
John Watson is unexpected, when he comes, but he shouldn’t be.
He should be, because Creation seeks its match in a mastery of opposites: the science of annihilation, of strategy, of battle; the art of healing, of taking the created and ensuring its perseverance in light of the world, despite the world at large.
He should be, because the Creator channels, is complemented—blossoms—in the sight of poetry (poor, embarrassingly so), of prose (henpecking aside, the blog is popular), of music (John eyes the second-hand clarinet every morning), of philosophy (of war, of want, of mending the broken, of maintaining the scarred).
John Watson is equilibrium and intensity. John Watson is all that Mycroft could have hoped for. John Watson evokes music, evokes joy, creates in his own right and pushes Sherlock, dares him to breathe the same.
Sherlock effloresces.
And that, to witness, creates its own magnificence, in kind.
__________________________
And if John Watson tries to take his place, tries to protect in the stead of the Protector, well.
Mycroft is the Preserver, above all else.
If other forces in this world wish to aid him, he’s learned better than to shun them, to spurn them, to scorn them for the sake of his pride.
Protecting is enough of a task, as it stands.
__________________________
When his brother falls from the heights, Mycroft’s being seizes, Mycroft’s body halts, Mycroft’s breathing stutters, catches: stops.
He is a Preserver. He is a Protector.
He can’t have failed so grievously. He cannot have failed.
Not again.
When his brother arrives before him, heartbroken but filled with a violent, manic hum in his blood, it is well enough.
Sherlock creates opportunity from loss, transforms his sacrifice into more, makes protection an artform and a vendetta and a vice and Mycroft wonders, not for the first time, if Sherlock ever truly needed anyone of them, for all the capacity for being that he holds in his own self, all the possibility he contains.
All that he is, the steel of him, given the opportunity to be tempered just so.
__________________________
Mary Morstan, like Dumas, is rather pedestrian.
Mycroft has her profiled, of course, as soon as she enters John’s sphere of being. For Sherlock’s sake. For John’s sake.
For Mycroft’s own sake.
There are no indications that she’s anything more than a liar—a woman with a lucrative hobby at which she excels, or else, did excel, until the Baron of Blackmail ran her into obscurity. Routine.
Mycroft even goes so far as to tap Magnussen’s paper trail on her background—he’s very skilled, Mycroft knows well enough, but the man’s not a spectre, not a spirit: he leaves prints, however faint—and despite the ominous memory stick (and another thing that Mycroft knows well enough is how misleading the importance of a memory stick can be), Abigail Gabrielle Rivers-Allton looks more like a Mary Morstan, anyway.
All’s the better.
He goes back to the book on his text, a primer in Swahili because Sherlock’s gone farther south than intended, than planned for, and Mycroft must be prepared if he intends to protect. He cannot be distracted by trinkets, by trifles, by the questionable choice of sexual partners displayed by other men.
Mycroft has larger demons for the slaying.
__________________________
By the time Mycroft realises all that he’s missed, it’s late.
It’s too late.
It was obvious, though. It was obvious and it had been staring him in the face the entire time, and he is a fool. He is a fool, and finally, finally, his foolishness may very well cost him everything.
He’d never cared for nicknames, himself. He much prefers the name he was given.
But she’s small, and she’s soft, and she’s more joy to the breath than a name so unwieldy, and if he digs deep enough, far enough, long enough back, he remembers that before she could speak, his darling sister: before she could protest it, they didn’t call her Cella.
By the time she learns the power of words, though, Sherlock’s long since shed a name so boring as William—heaven forbid anyone utter the moniker Billy—and Marycella insists that she be called by the last of her name, the best of her name.
Mary, after all, is so pedestrian.
__________________________
“You don’t tell John.”
Mycroft enters the room, and it’s a far cry from their mother’s library, it’s so far from those days, and so wrong, but they’re here.
The Trimūrti.
Ever untamed.
“Don’t tell John, Sherlock,” and it’s not a threat that’s spoken as Marycella Alyssia Guilianna Rienette Anise Holmes reaches, brushes the limp strands from Sherlock’s ashen face and coos, breathes, and Mycroft catches her in profile, and it’s there that he can see it: can see every procedure she’s undergone to shift the shape of her, the look of her, to soften her cheekbones and push at the line of her nose, he can smell the bleach on her hair and he can watch the shift of her contact lenses with every blink and he knows.
He knows.
It’s her.
“Don’t tell John,” she breathes, and Mycroft can hear all the layers start to crack and fold and peel away, skins she’s toughened and worn, and this is the antithesis of metamorphosis, this is transformation in reverse, and it’s not precisely destruction, for the fact that it’s worse.
Much worse.
“Don’t tell John,” and he can pick out the places where her accent’s changed, origins upon origins of the woman, of the madness, of the cosmos piled high, pieced together now in the shattering, and it shatters him, it shatters because his brother lies teetering, shivering on the very edge of the abyss and his sister, his sister sits teetering on the edge of a bed that’s the edge of a heart that’s the shred of a soul that is loss, and Mycroft has failed, many times.
This is more than that.
“But,” she exhales, shakily, rubbing thumbs across Sherlock’s knuckles, careful of the line in his arm. “Don’t keep it from John because you can’t tell him,” she tells his hands, his body, the hole she placed within. “Don’t keep the secret because you can’t say anything, anymore.”
“Cella.”
Mycroft says it, and she stiffens. She’d known he was there, he knows, and yet.
“I was just trying to keep him safe,” she whispers. Mycroft shakes his head.
“That was never your task.”
Her inhale catches, chokes.
“Good. Because I may not be very good at it,” she smiles, and it’s wretched.
“But if nothing else, I’m better than you.” She looks to Sherlock, and reaches for him, again, and he was always the love in her, he was always what transformed her toward a light that he himself did not possess. “Better than you at keeping him safe.”
And it’s venom, it’s hatred, and Mycroft remembers the report—pedestrian, like Dumas, and dear god, he is blind—but he remembers the subheading on distinguishing physical marks, and a scar of particular size, mottled and unremarkable, stands out in his mind from the pages where it bares itself in the flesh before him: a blotch on her wrist, and he remembers finding her, in the slaughter, before he had to let her vanish. He remembers the ink in her skin before she’d carved it out, burned it off, erased it from all memory save the memories of those that counted, for better or for worse.
Shiva as Nataraja. Dancing on the back of not the demon Ignorance, but of Harihara: the union of Protector and Destroyer.
Hatred, made manifest, and then devoured, decimated, denied.
Mycroft doesn’t know which fate is worse.
“I didn’t,” she gasps, and she’s five years old again with a broken finger; she’s a baby crying in the dark.
“I didn’t mean to hurt him like this,” she breathes, and her eyes don’t leave Sherlock’s prone form, as Mycroft’s don’t, but they see through him: they see each other, through him.
They see failure of all that they are, through him.
“It was instinct,” she murmurs, and he knows that; he knows. “And I...”
She turns, and she pleads with her eyes and her mouth screws up with absolute disdain:
“Mycroft—”
“He died,” Mycroft tells her, because for all that he’s failed in seeing, she’s failed in being, she’s failed at her core. “In surgery, they lost him.”
Mycroft knows. He’d damn near felt it.
“I wanted to protect him,” she confesses, low and empty, unrooted and adrift. “I came here, when I heard,” she swallows, hard, and her hands—small hands, such small hands that were made to shape, to renew in the razing, not to end—her hands wrap around Sherlock’s wrists and Mycroft doesn’t know whether to reach out, whether to stop her—Mycroft doesn’t know.
“I came here to protect his heart,” she breathes, careful and honest and she will forever be all opposites, she will never know peace, and she sounds young, so young.
But they were never young.
And it’s John, Mycroft realises, sees it plain as if it’s drawn before him, lit in flame.
John, left alone, left unguarded, is the heart.
And Sherlock was always Cella’s favorite, and Cella is Mary, and Mary has John, and Mary had wanted to protect the heart.
Good god.
“I wanted to protect his heart, and I stopped it instead,” she bites out, wrecked and wronged and twisted round all that she is and was and might be, could be, but won’t.
Won’t.
“I love him,” she stammers, just holding on to a wail. “I love him, and I didn’t mean…”
And Mycroft doesn’t know who he is, doesn’t know which loves she means, but it doesn’t matter.
This is a transformation for which there are no words.
This is a destruction that can only breed beyond knowing.
__________________________
When Sherlock wakes, they’re both with him. They’re with him, and there’s no one else.
As it should always rightly be, and will never truly stay.
He meets Mycroft’s eyes first, and there is something understood between them in the breath that shakes Sherlock’s bandaged chest, that sends ripples through the stratosphere.
Sherlock exhales, and darknesses shift, and Mycroft breathes anew as Sherlock turns, as Sherlock sees her, and he creates a whole long lost from all her pieces, for that is what he does.
“Cella,” he rasps, and she falls into him, and for all that it brings pain, must do, Sherlock holds her. Sherlock takes the tears against his bare skin and the pressure on his battered chest and he weighs them, catches her hair between his fingers.
Breathes.
Breathes.
And it is the breath, Mycroft thinks: the breath is the promise.
The promise of something that persists beyond failing.
“Don’t tell John.”
Mycroft turns, and sees Cella’s eyes on him, desperate, pleading, and it’s nothing to do with Sherlock, or John Watson even.
It’s nothing so clean-cut.
“Don’t tell John, not yet.”
Mycroft blinks.
Mycroft nods.
Enough blindness, he thinks. Enough hurting.
Enough failing.
__________________________
“You know what happened to the other one.”
And the thing is, as everything falls apart, when they make the last gasp as doing each other’s work—the Creator destroying where the Transformer tried to protect and all was nearly lost and barely found: as everything falls apart, and the East Wind blows, it’s renewal that is in the air, and these people, these men and women who think that they know what happened to the “other one” will never understand, will never comprehend what he is, what he does.
They know what they need to know, because it is superfluous, irrelevant.
They will know what they know—what they don’t—because Mycroft will do what he does regardless.
Mycroft will kill them to keep them. He will usher death and rebirth. He will see it done, unending.
He is the Preserver. He is the Protector.
And so he does not mourn for the plane as it ascends, because he knows what happened to the other one.
And she doesn’t mourn, either, as she stands next to their brother’s heart—stands guard, keeps safe against unraveling.
Keeps safe against herself.
And perhaps it’s all ambiguous, perhaps none of it is sound, but when the end draws near, Mycroft will forever resurrect this state, this frame of reference and becoming and unmaking in the light because he needs them, because it is necessary, because there is no other reality save the one where there are three, where they are all, where there is balance: perfect equity.
Nothing matters, beyond that they are whole.
Recipient:
marta_beeAuthor: hitlikehammers
Characters/Pairings: Mycroft Holmes, Sherlock Holmes, Original Holmes Sibling, Mary Morstan, John Watson; John/Sherlock
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 3,543
Warnings: Brief References to Mental Health Issues/Mood Disorders/Self-Harm
Summary: This is the story of what happened to “The Other One.”
Notes:
marta_bee, I did my utmost to give you an array of what you were looking for: Mycroft (which was so exciting, because I love writing Mycroft), a bit of John/Sherlock, some philosophy, some theology, some ethics, and some speculation on the character of Mary Morstan. I do hope it’s to your liking.All theological references made herein are made loosely and with much creative license; no disrespect is meant toward any tradition, nor is this intended to be a faithful representation of any canonical/accepted aspect of said tradition(s).
Moreover: no disrespect meant to Alexandre Dumas ;)
As children, the only thing they had in common was a love for their mother’s book collection.
Between them, they’d read aloud, argued over tomes, bickered amongst themselves as to which threesome they best resembled.
The Three Musketeers—no, Mycroft had shaken his head. Dumas is so pedestrian, he’d scolded, and the issues was never raised again.
The Brothers Gibb—Mycroft had thwacked his brother’s ear at the suggestion, much to Sherlock’s amusement, as Stayin’ Alive blared hatefully across the radio-waves.
No, Mycroft rather thought a different triad suited the Holmes children.
Sherlock, the Creator: always piecing together, always observing, always seeking something new.
Mycroft, the Preserver: ever watchful, ever willing to protect at any cost. Even if that cost itself was pain.
And the youngest of them, the tiny dancer flitting around the room with stray weeds from the garden threaded through her hair: Marycella, the Transformer. She changed everything, calmed Sherlock’s frenetics, softened Mycroft’s points.
The Trimūrti. Ever balanced, ever volatile, ever powerful.
Ever present.
In hindsight, Mycroft should have realised that Transformation was more than mere change, that Shiva did more than oversee the seasons and the tides of all that is as they transition, as being itself waxes and wanes. Mycroft should have seen what was to come.
He comforts himself with the patient reminder that he was young. He was young.
They were all so very young.
It’s a hollow comfort, though; it barely suits.
Because the Holmes’ were never young. Not really.
__________________________
She’s seven, and she’s afraid of her eldest brother.
She’s eight, and she’s Sherlock’s second shadow.
She’s nine, and Mycroft buys her a French Bulldog, because Redbeard’s gone deaf, is going blind, and he is Sherlock’s, and Sherlock is a creator: he will make something of the loss, when it comes.
It endears her to him some, but not much. Sherlock is still her everything.
She’s eleven-and-a-half, and they find the dead mourning doves. They blame Sherlock, tell him it’s high time to have grown out of this nonsense, ask him what kind of example he intends to set for his sister.
Cella says nothing.
She’s twelve when the dead things grow bigger, the bloodstains grow larger. They blame Sherlock, tell him they’re sending him away for a while, for his protection; for Marycella’s protection, too.
Cella sobs, and no one notices that the last of the decimated carcasses they come across are fresher than Sherlock’s hands could have caused.
__________________________
She’s sixteen when they find her in her room. When they find her with the blood on her hands. When they find her with the etchings in her flesh and the penknife in her hands and the strips of her own skin hanging from the blade. She’s sixteen, and she doesn’t cry, doesn’t flinch as the metal pierces, traces, draws out the red.
She’s sixteen when she singes her bedclothes.
She’s sixteen and she smells of smoke, and her eyes are too wide, too bruised around the rims.
She’s sixteen, and Mycroft has power, now.
Mycroft has power, and when they send her away like they sent Sherlock away, Mycroft stares at the conch he keeps at his bedside and wonders what power means; wonders what use power serves if it can’t stop this.
__________________________
Mycroft is the Preserver. Mycroft is the Protector.
So when he sits beside Sherlock’s bed and prays that his brother’s heart keeps beating, keeps being as stubborn, as foolish as the rest of him and just keeps beating—as he prays that Sherlock’s body doesn’t give in to the horrors with which he’s filled its veins, Mycroft knows that he’s been sleeping, he’s been sleeping the great, long sleep on the cosmic ocean: reflective, watching, complacent.
Blind.
All blind and all deaf and Sherlock did not create from the last loss heralded by those failings.
Mycroft grips his brother’s limp hand and vows: never again.
Never again.
__________________________
He failed, with Sherlock. He failed to see how to harness, how to channel Sherlock’s talents, Sherlock’s energies in a way that was sustainable, that would sustain the man himself and all he contains.
Never let it be said that Mycroft Holmes fails to learn from his mistakes.
His superiors are skeptical. She’s young, so young.
But the Holmes’ have never been young.
So Mycroft shows them what she can do, shows them her gifts, and something in his chest grows warm and sore when he sees the fire in her eyes: so vibrant, so very much alive.
She’s sent on her first assignment the week before her nineteenth birthday.
They gather at Mummy and Daddy’s for the day itself, Sherlock fresh from his third stint in rehab, Mycroft in the middle brokering a hostage exchange in Taiwan. They eat chocolate cake. He’s never seen Cella look so peaceful, so perfectly at ease.
Transformed, as she should. Transformed through destruction. The two in perfect equity.
Mycroft allows himself a second slice of cake.
__________________________
There are years, good years, that pass. Sherlock relapses, but never for long: he begins to take cases, and there’s a Detective Inspector that knows how to maintain the proper tension, the necessary lax and give. Sherlock relapses, but he creates.
There is more creation than there is waste.
Cella is a more valuable asset than even Mycroft could have predicted. By the time Mycroft has risen through the ranks, by the time Mycroft is no longer congratulated for his foresight in recruiting her but revered, Cella has helped shape the close of the twentieth century, has neutralised more threats than Mycroft can rightly count.
There is stronger transformation than destruction.
All is well.
__________________________
By the time it breaks, by the time it all comes crashing down, Mycroft has risen to a position where it’s inconvenient, professionally-speaking, but not devastating.
By the time it comes apart, by the time it rains down upon him, it is devastating in every other way, and Mycroft thinks, of course.
The two in perfect equity.
As it should always rightly be.
__________________________
It’s not that Cella fails in her assignment. It’s not that Cella falters in executing the mission.
It’s that collateral damage is oftentimes a given, but this.
This.
This is not the work of an asset.
This is the work of a Destroyer.
There is no transformation, here.
The charges that she faces are dire. The punishments, far worse.
And Mycroft is trusted. Mycroft has proven himself. Mycroft pleads the case to handle the issue himself, to spill whatever necessary blood on his own hands, to join both siblings in the red, the red, the red.
Mycroft wants to see justice done, wants to account, to atone for what he could not predict, could not foresee.
And Mycroft is trusted.
So Mycroft delivers the verdict. Mycroft’s swings the killing blow.
__________________________
But Mycroft is a Preserver.
He needs to protect.
There is no question to anyone who looks, to anyone who asks or seeks: there is no question.
Marycella Alyssia Guilianna Rienette Anise Holmes meets her earned demise.
Mycroft does not mourn. He cannot mourn.
Marycella Alyssia Guilianna Rienette Anise Holmes is dead.
Mycroft does not know any different.
He cannot know any different.
__________________________
It’s his assistant—charming woman, sharp-witted and reliable.
Trustworthy. Trustworthy in a way Mycroft isn’t, in a way Mycroft is incapable of mastering by necessity, by the very function of his nature.
It’s his assistant with the changeable names—charming, that, about the woman—that takes care of it.
Mycroft makes it clear that there can be no trace, that there can be no end left loose.
Mycroft makes it clear that no expense is to be spared; that no corner shall be cut.
Mycroft makes it clearest of all that he cannot know of any of it. Not what happens. Not what’s done. Not where and when or why.
He can know nothing.
That’s how he learns that he can count on Anthea.
She does the things he cannot know.
She does what he needs doing, so that he can protect.
__________________________
Their parents cry, when he tells them she’s gone. Sherlock’s hands twitch, and his eyes shine, and he says nothing.
And if he has to hurt to protect, to maintain, then he serves his aim, he fulfils his purpose.
But only by halves.
__________________________
John Watson is unexpected, when he comes, but he shouldn’t be.
He should be, because Creation seeks its match in a mastery of opposites: the science of annihilation, of strategy, of battle; the art of healing, of taking the created and ensuring its perseverance in light of the world, despite the world at large.
He should be, because the Creator channels, is complemented—blossoms—in the sight of poetry (poor, embarrassingly so), of prose (henpecking aside, the blog is popular), of music (John eyes the second-hand clarinet every morning), of philosophy (of war, of want, of mending the broken, of maintaining the scarred).
John Watson is equilibrium and intensity. John Watson is all that Mycroft could have hoped for. John Watson evokes music, evokes joy, creates in his own right and pushes Sherlock, dares him to breathe the same.
Sherlock effloresces.
And that, to witness, creates its own magnificence, in kind.
__________________________
And if John Watson tries to take his place, tries to protect in the stead of the Protector, well.
Mycroft is the Preserver, above all else.
If other forces in this world wish to aid him, he’s learned better than to shun them, to spurn them, to scorn them for the sake of his pride.
Protecting is enough of a task, as it stands.
__________________________
When his brother falls from the heights, Mycroft’s being seizes, Mycroft’s body halts, Mycroft’s breathing stutters, catches: stops.
He is a Preserver. He is a Protector.
He can’t have failed so grievously. He cannot have failed.
Not again.
When his brother arrives before him, heartbroken but filled with a violent, manic hum in his blood, it is well enough.
Sherlock creates opportunity from loss, transforms his sacrifice into more, makes protection an artform and a vendetta and a vice and Mycroft wonders, not for the first time, if Sherlock ever truly needed anyone of them, for all the capacity for being that he holds in his own self, all the possibility he contains.
All that he is, the steel of him, given the opportunity to be tempered just so.
__________________________
Mary Morstan, like Dumas, is rather pedestrian.
Mycroft has her profiled, of course, as soon as she enters John’s sphere of being. For Sherlock’s sake. For John’s sake.
For Mycroft’s own sake.
There are no indications that she’s anything more than a liar—a woman with a lucrative hobby at which she excels, or else, did excel, until the Baron of Blackmail ran her into obscurity. Routine.
Mycroft even goes so far as to tap Magnussen’s paper trail on her background—he’s very skilled, Mycroft knows well enough, but the man’s not a spectre, not a spirit: he leaves prints, however faint—and despite the ominous memory stick (and another thing that Mycroft knows well enough is how misleading the importance of a memory stick can be), Abigail Gabrielle Rivers-Allton looks more like a Mary Morstan, anyway.
All’s the better.
He goes back to the book on his text, a primer in Swahili because Sherlock’s gone farther south than intended, than planned for, and Mycroft must be prepared if he intends to protect. He cannot be distracted by trinkets, by trifles, by the questionable choice of sexual partners displayed by other men.
Mycroft has larger demons for the slaying.
__________________________
By the time Mycroft realises all that he’s missed, it’s late.
It’s too late.
It was obvious, though. It was obvious and it had been staring him in the face the entire time, and he is a fool. He is a fool, and finally, finally, his foolishness may very well cost him everything.
He’d never cared for nicknames, himself. He much prefers the name he was given.
But she’s small, and she’s soft, and she’s more joy to the breath than a name so unwieldy, and if he digs deep enough, far enough, long enough back, he remembers that before she could speak, his darling sister: before she could protest it, they didn’t call her Cella.
By the time she learns the power of words, though, Sherlock’s long since shed a name so boring as William—heaven forbid anyone utter the moniker Billy—and Marycella insists that she be called by the last of her name, the best of her name.
Mary, after all, is so pedestrian.
__________________________
“You don’t tell John.”
Mycroft enters the room, and it’s a far cry from their mother’s library, it’s so far from those days, and so wrong, but they’re here.
The Trimūrti.
Ever untamed.
“Don’t tell John, Sherlock,” and it’s not a threat that’s spoken as Marycella Alyssia Guilianna Rienette Anise Holmes reaches, brushes the limp strands from Sherlock’s ashen face and coos, breathes, and Mycroft catches her in profile, and it’s there that he can see it: can see every procedure she’s undergone to shift the shape of her, the look of her, to soften her cheekbones and push at the line of her nose, he can smell the bleach on her hair and he can watch the shift of her contact lenses with every blink and he knows.
He knows.
It’s her.
“Don’t tell John,” she breathes, and Mycroft can hear all the layers start to crack and fold and peel away, skins she’s toughened and worn, and this is the antithesis of metamorphosis, this is transformation in reverse, and it’s not precisely destruction, for the fact that it’s worse.
Much worse.
“Don’t tell John,” and he can pick out the places where her accent’s changed, origins upon origins of the woman, of the madness, of the cosmos piled high, pieced together now in the shattering, and it shatters him, it shatters because his brother lies teetering, shivering on the very edge of the abyss and his sister, his sister sits teetering on the edge of a bed that’s the edge of a heart that’s the shred of a soul that is loss, and Mycroft has failed, many times.
This is more than that.
“But,” she exhales, shakily, rubbing thumbs across Sherlock’s knuckles, careful of the line in his arm. “Don’t keep it from John because you can’t tell him,” she tells his hands, his body, the hole she placed within. “Don’t keep the secret because you can’t say anything, anymore.”
“Cella.”
Mycroft says it, and she stiffens. She’d known he was there, he knows, and yet.
“I was just trying to keep him safe,” she whispers. Mycroft shakes his head.
“That was never your task.”
Her inhale catches, chokes.
“Good. Because I may not be very good at it,” she smiles, and it’s wretched.
“But if nothing else, I’m better than you.” She looks to Sherlock, and reaches for him, again, and he was always the love in her, he was always what transformed her toward a light that he himself did not possess. “Better than you at keeping him safe.”
And it’s venom, it’s hatred, and Mycroft remembers the report—pedestrian, like Dumas, and dear god, he is blind—but he remembers the subheading on distinguishing physical marks, and a scar of particular size, mottled and unremarkable, stands out in his mind from the pages where it bares itself in the flesh before him: a blotch on her wrist, and he remembers finding her, in the slaughter, before he had to let her vanish. He remembers the ink in her skin before she’d carved it out, burned it off, erased it from all memory save the memories of those that counted, for better or for worse.
Shiva as Nataraja. Dancing on the back of not the demon Ignorance, but of Harihara: the union of Protector and Destroyer.
Hatred, made manifest, and then devoured, decimated, denied.
Mycroft doesn’t know which fate is worse.
“I didn’t,” she gasps, and she’s five years old again with a broken finger; she’s a baby crying in the dark.
“I didn’t mean to hurt him like this,” she breathes, and her eyes don’t leave Sherlock’s prone form, as Mycroft’s don’t, but they see through him: they see each other, through him.
They see failure of all that they are, through him.
“It was instinct,” she murmurs, and he knows that; he knows. “And I...”
She turns, and she pleads with her eyes and her mouth screws up with absolute disdain:
“Mycroft—”
“He died,” Mycroft tells her, because for all that he’s failed in seeing, she’s failed in being, she’s failed at her core. “In surgery, they lost him.”
Mycroft knows. He’d damn near felt it.
“I wanted to protect him,” she confesses, low and empty, unrooted and adrift. “I came here, when I heard,” she swallows, hard, and her hands—small hands, such small hands that were made to shape, to renew in the razing, not to end—her hands wrap around Sherlock’s wrists and Mycroft doesn’t know whether to reach out, whether to stop her—Mycroft doesn’t know.
“I came here to protect his heart,” she breathes, careful and honest and she will forever be all opposites, she will never know peace, and she sounds young, so young.
But they were never young.
And it’s John, Mycroft realises, sees it plain as if it’s drawn before him, lit in flame.
John, left alone, left unguarded, is the heart.
And Sherlock was always Cella’s favorite, and Cella is Mary, and Mary has John, and Mary had wanted to protect the heart.
Good god.
“I wanted to protect his heart, and I stopped it instead,” she bites out, wrecked and wronged and twisted round all that she is and was and might be, could be, but won’t.
Won’t.
“I love him,” she stammers, just holding on to a wail. “I love him, and I didn’t mean…”
And Mycroft doesn’t know who he is, doesn’t know which loves she means, but it doesn’t matter.
This is a transformation for which there are no words.
This is a destruction that can only breed beyond knowing.
__________________________
When Sherlock wakes, they’re both with him. They’re with him, and there’s no one else.
As it should always rightly be, and will never truly stay.
He meets Mycroft’s eyes first, and there is something understood between them in the breath that shakes Sherlock’s bandaged chest, that sends ripples through the stratosphere.
Sherlock exhales, and darknesses shift, and Mycroft breathes anew as Sherlock turns, as Sherlock sees her, and he creates a whole long lost from all her pieces, for that is what he does.
“Cella,” he rasps, and she falls into him, and for all that it brings pain, must do, Sherlock holds her. Sherlock takes the tears against his bare skin and the pressure on his battered chest and he weighs them, catches her hair between his fingers.
Breathes.
Breathes.
And it is the breath, Mycroft thinks: the breath is the promise.
The promise of something that persists beyond failing.
“Don’t tell John.”
Mycroft turns, and sees Cella’s eyes on him, desperate, pleading, and it’s nothing to do with Sherlock, or John Watson even.
It’s nothing so clean-cut.
“Don’t tell John, not yet.”
Mycroft blinks.
Mycroft nods.
Enough blindness, he thinks. Enough hurting.
Enough failing.
__________________________
“You know what happened to the other one.”
And the thing is, as everything falls apart, when they make the last gasp as doing each other’s work—the Creator destroying where the Transformer tried to protect and all was nearly lost and barely found: as everything falls apart, and the East Wind blows, it’s renewal that is in the air, and these people, these men and women who think that they know what happened to the “other one” will never understand, will never comprehend what he is, what he does.
They know what they need to know, because it is superfluous, irrelevant.
They will know what they know—what they don’t—because Mycroft will do what he does regardless.
Mycroft will kill them to keep them. He will usher death and rebirth. He will see it done, unending.
He is the Preserver. He is the Protector.
And so he does not mourn for the plane as it ascends, because he knows what happened to the other one.
And she doesn’t mourn, either, as she stands next to their brother’s heart—stands guard, keeps safe against unraveling.
Keeps safe against herself.
And perhaps it’s all ambiguous, perhaps none of it is sound, but when the end draws near, Mycroft will forever resurrect this state, this frame of reference and becoming and unmaking in the light because he needs them, because it is necessary, because there is no other reality save the one where there are three, where they are all, where there is balance: perfect equity.
Nothing matters, beyond that they are whole.
