Chapter Text
Sherlock Holmes was three years old when he realised what it meant to be a nought. He was in the park - if it could actually be called a park - with Mycroft when a Cross boy, perhaps five years old, ran in to him as he was collecting leaves and knocked him flat on his back.
In all the shouting that followed, all that Sherlock registered was that the Cross boy was helped up, he was left on the ground and that Mycroft received a slap to the face from the mother of the Cross boy for ‘failing to control his filthy ruffian of a brother’. Having made contact with Mycroft’s face, the woman then scrubbed her hands furiously against her trousers before taking her son’s hand and leading him away.
Mycroft was silent on the way home, but he held onto Sherlock’s hand extra hard and Sherlock, for once, did not protest.
Sherlock Holmes was six when he started school, a whole two years later than his Cross counterparts were obliged to. With his neighbourhood being very close to a Cross neighbourhood, he saw the Cross school on his way.
‘That school looks nicer,’ he said, pointing as he dragged his shoes with their peeling soles along the cracked pavement.
‘Yes,’ Mycroft, who was escorting him, agreed. And then, ‘Walk properly please, Sherlock. You’re not some kind of street urchin.’
‘I bet the people at that school think I am,’ Sherlock said, looking a little wistfully through the fence that marked the dividing line between the nought and Cross neighbourhoods.
Mycroft did not reply. There was nothing to say.
Sherlock Holmes was seven and a half when he heard his older brother break down for the first (and last) time in his life.
‘But please,’ Mycroft pleaded with their parents, while Sherlock crouched at the top of the stairs and peeped through the banisters anxiously. ‘Please. I want to go to school. It doesn’t even have to be a good school. There must be a way. Please.’
‘You’re too old,’ their mother sighed wearily. ‘Come on, Mycroft, you know this. There’s nothing we can do.’
‘You could bribe a school,’ Mycroft said desperately. ‘Money talks, you know that.’
‘Money we don’t have, son,’ their father reminded him. ‘You’re getting ideas above your station, above our station.’
‘I ain’t worse than any Cross,’ Mycroft spat, his carefully honed grammar failing him in his anger.
From his position on the landing, Sherlock was almost positive he heard a muffled sob before Mycroft stormed out of the living room and up the stairs, falling over Sherlock on the way to their room.
Sherlock Holmes was eleven when he came home from his new secondary school and declared it an utter waste of time.
‘There’s nothing there,’ he announced, slamming the school bag which had been previously been Mycroft’s onto the floor. ‘There are forty kids in a class and no books in the library and no equipment in the science labs and the teachers are quite useless.’
‘Well, that’s because nought teachers aren’t allowed the same training as Cross teachers,’ his mother explained, as if it made perfect sense.
‘I know that, obviously,’ Sherlock sneered. ‘But they’re all idiots anyway. It was beyond boring.’
‘Try and behave yourself,’ his mother implored him anxiously.
He lasted two months before blowing something up. They would have chucked him out, but there was nowhere else for him to go.
Sherlock Holmes was twelve when his brother first spoke out loud the promise that Sherlock knew he’d made a long time ago, on the way home from the park when Sherlock was three.
‘It won’t be like this for you,’ Mycroft vowed. ‘I promise it won’t. I’ll change it for you. You’ll be able to stay at school past fourteen. You’ll be able to go to a good school, a really good one, with lots of chemistry equipment and tonnes of books. I don’t know how quickly I can make it happen so you might have to leave for a bit and then go back, but it will happen, it will. Everything will be better in the end, I promise.’
‘I don’t want that,’ Sherlock replied.
Mycroft had just smiled. In the morning, he was gone.
Mycroft Holmes was nineteen when he went to London.
Mycroft Holmes was nineteen when he realised just how difficult it might be to keep the promise he had given his brother.
Mycroft Holmes was nineteen when he realised just how mild the racism was at home compared to the racism in London.
Mycroft Holmes was nineteen when he told himself again and again and again that he couldn’t let his brother down.
Mycroft Holmes was nineteen when he curled up on a shockingly thin mattress under a shockingly thin blanket in the most squalid excuse for a boarding house he’d ever seen, and thought harder than he’d ever thought in his life.
Mycroft Holmes was twenty-three when he finally allowed himself to acknowledge that it might take him a very, very long to time to make good that promise he’d made Sherlock, all those years ago.