Chapter Text
It starts with a stomach ache.
Actually, it starts because condoms are easily acquired for a London man hoping for weekend entertainment, but Mycroft does that in hopes of being kind to his wife. The stomach ache comes shortly after.
Baker Street hushes well. It is far too well-made for causing trouble, what with all the white-bricked sensibility that those who can newly afford to live there might lack. Not Mycroft Holmes, though. Mycroft Holmes is an unobtrusive addition that knows his place. So of course, house and street love him, once they get over their initial worries and prejudices1. All too quick it is home.
All too quick he purchases a discrete little package from his barber and comes home with a spring in his step from a good day’s work and a condom in his pocket for his wife.
In their doggedness, he and Melissa are a well-made match. The narrow desk of their bedroom might have been designed, once upon a time, for a wealthy lady’s letter writing, but these past weeks they have easily traded it between residue of his work and an ever-increasing list of what she hopes to change in the house2, or concepts she wants to research.
“The builders can’t come tomorrow,” Melissa announces without rising from her frowning. She is already dressed for bed, and left a book partway read at the side of the bed to deal with another thought.
“Why not?” he asks, coming around to take her empty cup of tea. “More?”
She shakes her head. “Termites.”
“Here?”
“Never.”
“Pity.”
Melissa scratches out a neat line. “In short.”
Mycroft undresses to the melody of pen on paper, rolling out his wrists from a long day of his own writing. The bitterness from his peers during his early engagement has fizzled back to something akin to tolerating. From his bosses, he is highly recommended for secrecy and loyalty, and would have made many introductions to his father-in-law, if the man were healthy enough to receive them.
The clock chimes the hour. Grace comes for the tea tray and scurries back into the dark hall just as quick. Far, far away, he hears Richard Brook cough, though only because he knows to listen for it. After all, Baker Street hushes well.
Hushes, and holds, so near to autumn. Mycroft takes the discrete package from his trouser pocket.
“Did your father answer about coming to dinner next month?” Melissa asks.
Mycroft sits on the bed. “Regretfully, he suspects he’ll be gone into the new year. Someone at the Ottoman Polytechnic Institute wants to do interesting things with butterflies.”
“What sort of interesting?”
“I’m sure he’d be happy to tell you.”
She hums, almost laughing. “He’ll be in Constantinople for some time then, yes?”
“As I said.”
“Good. I believe my father owns some land near there. A mountain. It’d be good to check my memory.” She notes the idea. “Did he have a chance to see your mother?”
“He didn’t say.”
“Pity,” she echoes.
“Melissa--”
Sighing, his wife sits back, combing loose hair over one shoulder. “Yes, Mycroft?”
“You said you did not want to be a mother.” He keeps talking through the catch of her surprise and the thickness of his shame. “This would provide you a degree of protection so that nothing happens.”
“This?” She turns, sharp, to take in what he offers her. The rubber curls in his palm. Like some discarded reptile shed.
It does not, he admits, feel arousing.
Still, Melissa regards it as she does everything at night, half-sunk into shadows, balancing between selves. “Well,” she says.
“For protection,” he repeats. “Should we ever.”
“Yes.” Her attention rises to hold his.
They have been married for three weeks now, and shared a bed for all but that one night in Appleton. Each time it is a little easier if only because Mycroft can stay late enough at work to make sleep more important than who it is beside.
This, though. This, only the once.
A husband is supposed to want it. A wife is supposed to want to give it.
She doesn’t move. Saliva pools at his back teeth. He swallows hard.
All things are strung taut with their marriage bed between them.
Melissa looks away first. “Some water?” she asks, standing.
“Yes,” he says. They are always echoing each other.
She pours them each a cup before coming to sit on her side of the bed. The water does little to alleviate his distant urge to vomit, but it is good to do something together, though he does not quite know what to do with the condom still in his hand and ends up just resting it on his leg.
After a few minutes of silence, Melissa twists to rest her glass on her bedside table. The low light shines through her chemise, catching the shadows of her body, the small swing of her breasts.
Mycroft is horribly relieved he cannot feel himself growing hard. Not even when she turns back to put a hand on his thigh, though that touch makes goose pimples rise like a swarm.
“Melissa--” he starts, but her name lags on his tongue, right vowels blurring into the wrong ones as the aforementioned stomach ache comes on quick. He groans.
“What’s wrong?” Melissa asks, stilling, hand on his thigh, fingers curving to hold tight. “Mycroft? What happened? What hurts?”
He grimaces. “It’s my stomach.”
“Where?”
Another wave of pain makes him groan again. By the time it passes, she has taken his temperature with her hand.
“You’re hot. Must have eaten something odd. Are you nauseous?”
The nausea comes like its name summoned it. “A little.”
“I’m going to fetch something to help settle your stomach.”
He lets his head fall back against the wall as she stands from the bed, wielding her robe like a swan taking flight, but he is asleep on his own before she comes back.
It is the middle of the night when he wakes with just enough time to turn to the side before his stomach empties. Over the next few days, only the stomach ache lingers, slowly spreading into a sore throat no amount of honeyed tea will budge.
Melissa worries. She asks after symptoms and checks his temperature often enough that it is not quite intentional that Mycroft doesn’t tell her the whole truth, only he has a well-established method for dealing with physical discomfort that he sees no need to change, especially when she has so much else to concern her. He does not tell anyone how difficult it is to keep food down, or how sometimes he struggles to catch his breath.
After all, there is Sherlock, come to stay at Baker Street for a short while before the next term in an attempt to ease a relationship between wife and brother.
Regrettably, Sherlock is no more keen on Melissa than he was at the dinner just before the wedding. She, in contrast, is decidedly less fond without the façade of a public space to protect moods, especially because Sherlock’s trouble often comes from his ability to escape even the closest eye.
Mycroft does try to distract his little brother. For one day, he uses Sherlock in lieu of telegrams, claiming necessary security, and for the next he tells Sherlock to catalogue the house’s taxidermy.
The first ends with Sherlock’s trousers utterly ruined by something he refuses to elaborate on3, and the second with him and Grace attempting to get Richard Brook out of bed so Sherlock might explain to him exactly how much horned rabbits are not real.
That he dragged the poor young housemaid into his foolishness might be the worst crime to Mycroft4. Melissa, quite understandably, gives Sherlock a lecture on her father’s illness, which quiets Sherlock for the next day as he researches something in one of Melissa’s older medical textbooks5.
On the fourth and final day, Mycroft very much hopes more quiet research will keep Sherlock occupied until their intended visit to Beechworth that afternoon. He should have known better.
Later, Mycroft will swear he was gone for barely ten minutes, hoping early morning fresh air would help soothe his stomach before he leaves for work, but ten minutes is more than enough time to cause trouble.
“It is not a pet.” Melissa is shouting when Mycroft finds them in – of course Sherlock would end up in the worst possible place – the make-shift library. “It is vermin, and I want it out of my house. Now!”
“I never said it was a pet,” Sherlock counters, cradling something out of sight, back against a wall.
“Out!” Melissa hefts a book. Though not even rage can make her throw one of her most treasured possessions, she is clearly considering it.
“I can’t leave,” Sherlock points out, rather imperiously. “You’re in my way.”
“Sherlock,” Mycroft says, stepping sidelong around his wife, “what do you have there?”
“Vermin,” Melissa snaps, as Sherlock says, “a mouse.”
The thing Sherlock is hiding squeaks, in case there was any doubt.
Mycroft blinks. “A mouse?”
Melissa turns on Mycroft, gesturing with the book. “He brought it in here.”
“Why, brother dear?”
“Experiment.”
Mycroft frowns. “On the mouse?”
Sherlock shrugs. “In so many words.”
“He is not allowed in this room,” Melissa says. “Ever again.”
“What if I need a book?”
“I’ll fetch it for you.”
“No,” Melissa interrupts. “He can’t touch them. Not until he’s bleached.”
“I’ll make sure he washes.”
“Twice.”
“And the mouse stays outside. Can we all agree?”
For a moment, Mycroft is certain Melissa is in fact going to throw the book, rationality be damned, but then Sherlock nods and she lowers the threat, red-cheeked.
She huffs. “Get him out of here, Mycroft.”
“I will,” Mycroft promises. And then, to make the point, and not wanting to risk the mouse escaping, Mycroft drags Sherlock out of the room by the collar. “You absolute idiot.”
“He’s friendly – ow!” Sherlock’s shoulder knocks quite hard against a doorframe. Guilt flares and is gone just as quick.
“What were you thinking, Sherlock, bringing a mouse into her house?”
“It’s your house too.”
“No mice in my house either.”
“You never cared before.”
Mycroft stops and shakes his brother until teeth click. “You’ve brought a mouse into the house before?”
“Only once!”
He swats the side of Sherlock’s head, earning more imperiousness.
The mouse is released unexperimented on, and Sherlock given a surgeon’s wash before Mycroft agrees to let him back inside. The whole affair sparks a raging headache, not helped by the builders finally turning up to knock through a wall.
A week later, Mycroft collapses trying to stand from his desk in the Foreign Office and must be carried home. Melissa settles him in their marriage bed with much concern – at least, he assumes that she’s the one to do it, consciousness keeps slipping.
“You never do rest like you should,” she tells him, organizing something on the dresser that sounds like a rainstorm made miniature. “But this will help.”
“I need to go back--” the words dissolve to coughing.
Melissa tsks over her shoulder at him. “How is your abdomen? Much pain?”
“I’m fine,” he manages.
“No,” she says, and brings over some pills and a glass of water.
He recognizes them, though efforts to push her away fall limply. “I don’t want sedatives.”
“Let me worry about that. You focus on getting better. Take them.”
Mycroft does try to keep his mouth shut, turning his face away. Her response is to pinch his nose until he’s gasping worse than before, then dump in the pills and water so he is forced to swallow.
“Shh,” she urges, smoothing a hand across his forehead as Mycroft tries and fails to cough the pills back up. “I’ll look after you, Mycroft. Just do as you’re told.”
He has seen just how quick the medication works on his mother, and as it turns out, he is no different. Time slips easily, stuffing his head with bees as tingling spills from his fingers and toes until his limbs are heavy, leaden anchors. The pain in his stomach dulls to a distance, the eagle at his liver not quite eating its fill.
And then, the bees start speaking.
“Clever,” says the king bee to the queen. “But not enough. He knew something was wrong. I knew the symptoms.”
The queen bee buzzes something prettily, but too low for Mycroft to tell. It makes the king bee smile.
“Lafarge thought so too.”
“You said nothing before,” says the queen bee.
“That was before.”
“And now?”
Mycroft does not think bees have kings anymore. It would be very unpatriotic if they did. A prince consort bee, perhaps, from bee Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld to organize a bee Great Exhibition.
“Will you tell him?” asks the queen bee.
“Will you?” answers the king, which is not a very good answer at all and seems rather unfair.
Mycroft tries to say so and can only hum until a cool cloth is lain on his brow and the queen is dripping honey into his eyes until he falls asleep again.
But when Mycroft wakes the next time, it is to his father sitting at the desk, writing a letter.
“Father,” he says, face heavy with fading numbness.
Silas glances back. “Ah, good, you’re awake.”
Mycroft licks his lips. They taste, oddly, of garlic. “I thought you were in Constantinople.”
“Sherlock wrote.”
“To you?”
“Something about a mouse.”
Squinting, Mycroft tilts his head to look around the room. The light has been kept low, and someone made a pallet beside the bed to keep watch. “Where’s Melissa?”
His father chuckles. “Oh, your wife is quite busy these days. Planning her father’s funeral, and all that.”
Mycroft’s heart jumps. “What?”
“It’s a pity. Mourning attire doesn’t suit her.”
“Her father died?”
Silas turns in the chair to regard his son. In the dimmed light, it is difficult to tell his expression. “Yes, generally, a death is required for planning a funeral. Don’t try to sit up, Mycroft, she had you on quite a few sedatives.”
Mycroft tries a moment longer before submitting to the order. It is an effort to keep his eyes open, but he makes it as best he can. “I want to see her.”
“How are you feeling?”
“She should know that I’m awake.”
His father inclines his head, and stands. “As I said, she’s busy. Are you having any chest pain?”
“No,” he lies6. “Father--”
Silas takes up one of Mycroft’s hands, and his father’s touch is so hot it wants to scald. “Pins and needles? Can you feel this?”
The pinch of his finger is dull.
“Please,” Mycroft says, eyes fluttering.
His wrist is turned over, his pulse taken. “Your throat?”
“Water.”
Silas nods. He fetches a glass, but doesn’t pass it over, knowing Mycroft’s arm wouldn’t have the strength to hold even that little weight. Mycroft doesn’t even try. He is his mother’s son.
Melissa arrives partway through the second glass. In mourning blacks, she is starkly not herself. Only a crow, or a shadow, hiding in the doorway until Silas notices her, and welcomes her, as if this were not her house, her bedroom.
“He has asked for you,” his father says, smiling as he offers her the space by Mycroft’s side with a flourish of his hand.
Her approach gives the man a wide berth. She does not touch Mycroft either, only twists her hands. “How are you feeling?”
Mycroft holds her gaze as best as he can when the world so deeply wants to spin off on some strange adventure far from here. “I’m sorry for your father.”
Like a loosed dam, she sits heavily on the bed, hand going for his forehead but he catches it first. “Mycroft…”
From the desk, he hears his father chuckle to himself.
“I’m sorry,” Mycroft repeats.
Melissa nods. She does not look away. If she has been crying, he cannot tell, but he would be more worried if he could.
Then, careful, allowing even a weak man time to pull away, she bends to kiss him. He lets her.
1. Even the young housemaid learns she does not need to run from his arrival. Often, she is the one he ends up seeing first upon his return home, dusting and dousing lights. She will freeze, and he will nod, and in coming weeks a damp cloth will be ready by the door so he can wipe off the dirt of a London commute, and when he thanks her, she flushes. return to text
2. Her priority, of course, is more bookcases, intending to knock through two spare bedrooms for a library, but old shelves need reinforcing. return to text
3. Mycroft sends Sherlock to deal with the housekeeper on his own. return to text
4. She is shaking as he escorts her down to the kitchen, and even after hours with her relative she nearly drops a tray. return to text
5. “Hardly relevant two decades after publication,” she tells Sherlock, though he clearly pretends not to hear her. return to text
6. There is a whimper building in Mycroft’s chest that he barely has enough awareness to keep down. return to text