Author: Regency

Title: Reigate Revisited

Pairing: None

Spoilers: None

Rating: G/Everyone

Summary: AU of the AU. Mycroft muses over the man he's become. Mummy Holmes reminisces over the boy he was. Sherlock, as ever, wonders where he fits. Follows The Reigate Boys.

Author's Notes: This is an AU of the AU. I originally conceived of Reigate Mycroft's background somewhat differently, but then I became fascinated with examining how a young Mycroft might have coped with being the adoptive elder brother of such a brilliant boy as Sherlock Holmes.

Disclaimer: I don't own any characters recognizable as being from Sherlock. They are the property of their actors, producers, writers, and studios, not me. No copyright infringement was intended and no money was made in the writing or distribution of this story. It was good, clean fun.

~!~

All people want to be understood, but perhaps not entirely…

…

John Watson is wearing an abominable holiday jumper that offends Mycroft's sartorial senses as well as his eyes in equal measure. Why did I encourage Sherlock to bring him along?

"He doesn't understand it, you know, why you decided to have children. And I have to admit you don't strike me as the paternal sort."

Mycroft merely arches an eyebrow in benign amusement. He had tired of questions regarding his paternal instincts when Ian was a month old and he finally felt secure enough in his son's survival to allow for the distribution of birth announcements. There had been looks then, sidelong glances he ignored and less subtle entreaties made to him in direct conversation, all that seemed to imply the same, that the Ice Man, he of no human emotion, of so little heart, was inappropriate—nay, incapable of raising any creature kinder than a goblin to goodness. Twenty years and four happy boys has evidently left his reputation untarnished.

"Family means a great deal to me, Dr. Watson. Perhaps I merely wanted one to call my own."

…

Mycroft is a man of modest desires. A steady career, which he has nurtured to perfection, his piano finely tuned, and a surfeit of minor interests besides. His research into the nature of man, natural experiments he observes, other matters Sherlock might understand were Mycroft to share them yet cannot because Mycroft won't (his long-quashed tendency to stockpile necessities manifests here now). Beyond those discreet, ambitious joys, Mycroft wants only for the contentment of those he cares for most.

As for himself, his children are the only happiness he has ever found that does not carry a debt.

…

He is twenty-one and mortified that he allowed sentiment to cloud good sense and whatever will he do with a child, alone at that, and his career his dreams his hopes…Nine months of madness surges past in search of one infinitesimal moment of grace: The boy has his eyes. Afterwards, Mycroft breathes, he plans. Better still, he muddles through. There is a world to change and, finally, a reason to begin.

He is twenty-four and holding a new-born who has his chin and his long toes.

He is twenty-eight and bouncing a scowling infant who hates the tickle monster but loathes when Mycroft turns its loving wrath upon anyone else.

He is thirty-one and keeping vigil over twins, a boy and girl, who fight valiantly to live when a traitor who'd infiltrated the Home Office's internal staff had bid them die.

He is thirty-two and placing hydrangeas over a tended grave to soothe a solemn, lonesome son who no longer cries when he decides that four is enough.

…

Mycroft and Mummy drink in the warm indoors whilst his sons wage a snowball war against an army doctor and his consulting detective in the courtyard. John directs Sherlock's energies to fortifying their defences and launches offensive volleys under his own power. Lysander, observing from the rear, analyses their opposition to mimic and improve upon their battle strategy. Ian applies his brother's recommendations in his precise way, reinforcing their wintry foxhole against the possibility of guerrilla tactics. Cavendish is charged with keeping them in ammunition. Baz crows imminent victory over the battlements to demoralize their enemies amid a bevy of creative profanity for his own amusement.

Mummy is shaking her head affectionately in response to the latter when Mycroft realizes how strategic it had been for his mother to suggest outdoor activities for the others with Mycroft on the verge of a head cold.

"The ladies at the Office are always jealous when I tell them stories about the boys." There is no need to specify which office his mother means. By its vagueness, its import is implied, and his mother has offices everywhere. "Few of their children are so well settled in their careers that they can begin thinking of purchasing homes much less settling down to family."

Mycroft drinks his mulled wine expectantly. His mother's words carry weight behind them, she will need to ease the burden of them soon.

"I always wondered why you started so young."

"Youth is usually cause enough for an act of indiscretion."

"The one, I'll grant. Less so, four in short order. You learn from mistakes, Mycroft, you don't repeat them."

He takes care not to crush his glass as he sets it down on the finely crafted table top. It had been a gift from Father, the first of many Mycroft had seen exchanged between the two before his father's death.

"I do not look upon my children as mistakes." He laces his fingers together to set underneath his chest. "Each of them was chosen in their time and they are very much loved, I assure you."

"As were you."

Mycroft allows for a bland smile in reply. "I'm well aware of that. I was very fortunate that you and Father were prepared to welcome a child into your home when I was in need of one. I'm unsure what would have become of me had I remained in the children's home."

He doesn't dwell on his origins often. It doesn't do to look back on might-have-beens. His parents had been clever anarchist ne'er-do-wells who had eschewed wealth and made enemies and set no contingencies for their young son when mortality snagged at brilliance's shins. They had lived rather as Sherlock was wont to do, surviving on adrenalin and stardust, sparkling so brightly they failed to realize they were not guiding stars meant to light the way home but fuses set to expire in a sudden, violent conflagration in the dark.

He was only two.

Very little of them survives in his memory, save for the smell of gunpowder and talcum on gentle scarred hands, a hint of citrus on a delicate neck. He has never known his biological parents, really, but he found in the days after Sherlock was born that he came to miss them all the same.

"How many years," his living mother asks, "have you sat convinced you were the cuckoo child in our robins' nest?"

He blinks once, twice. "Pardon?"

"You were bright even as a baby," she retorts in lieu of explanation.

He permits her to ignore the fact that she only met him at three years of age when his lack of stability had left him hoarding food and hissing at any hands that reached for him. He was no baby in Great-Gran-Mere Vernet's antique cradle. He'd been much too big for it by the time Mummy and Father had taken him in. Sherlock had been a perfect fit. He had made rapturous ruin of a number of cherished family heirlooms before he bothered to string a full sentence together, all of which a young Mycroft had made innumerable futile efforts to repair. His adoptive relations had laughed for they had newer and better things to bequeath unto the young hellion. But Mycroft had known even then how easily beautiful things could be lost and failed to share their mirth.

"I was barely verbal, withdrawn, and overweight," he reminds Mummy. He takes refuge in fact, not frivolities. Fanciful recreations make him wish and wishes rarely count for much in retrospect.

"You were a ravenous bibliophile. You hoarded books. The moment one was given to you, you tucked it out of sight, worried somebody would snatch it from you before you got to the best part." Mummy had fretted over his distrustful tentativeness until he was eight when Sherlock's rebellions began to impact the world around him, leaving her nerves taut for a different cause.

"It's all the best part."

She smiles at him as if he's said something magical and perhaps, in her mind, he has.

"I thought you had adjusted. Sherlock was born and you became the consummate elder sibling. You entertained him, you taught him, protected him. He worshiped you."

"Children are predisposed to revere what, who they see each day. Familiarity, closeness, affection, it's all of a piece to filial camaraderie."

Mummy inhales the sweetened steam rising from her cider. "You were such a curious boy at first." She lowers her cup, her eyes alight. "Do you remember the story of the Catacomb Killer?"

Mycroft's smile is more genuine once he calls to mind three evenings in the summer of his fifth year where his mother perched beside him in a scraggly tree to share her history. The Catacomb Killer was the height of her professional career. A perspicacious mind concealed by a meticulous butcher's sleight of hand.

"Notes in the manner of receipts for goods sold were lodged in the ocular orbits of two underground corpses, and in the skeletal gullet of another; a macabre system of accounting."

"Bodies dismembered and wrapped like parcels for the cooking matching those descriptions." She brushes her fingers across her lip, a habit Sherlock in his teeming unconscious had latched onto as a babe and not outgrown.

Three of these grotesque deliveries had been made to the Vernet apartments in Paris where Mummy had resided when Father was on diplomatic missions abroad. There had been no children, then. For the best. Sherlock might have tried to keep the evidence.

"The hand-notated receipts were peerless imitations, so pristinely done they seemed more fabrication than genuine article."

"A butcher exhibiting that level of experience would scrawl out of habit, as a doctor's signature or a celebrity's becomes less distinguishable with time," he continues in her stead.

"Someone who would want us to think they were very good."

"Perhaps even too good," he confirms, tilting his head as he recalls the particulars of the case once again.

"A cunning bit of misdirection. I was impressed."

That she still is, is not her secret alone. Sherlock came by his intellectual fancies naturally. Mycroft had discovered his own through trial and error.

"You stopped being curious when Sherlock was born and started pulling strings. You ceased to ask me questions in order to perform your own investigations. You became indispensable as a minder instead of merely my son." She angles her neck just so and Lysander appears in her silhouette, fraught with a riddle that won't be solved by intellect alone.

"You must admit Sherlock required the additional supervision."

The giggle that erupts from her lips begins in her chest and rises. "Not so different from the present-day. But he has his minder now and you're on to raising a clan of him."

Mycroft savours his drink, the headiness of it, the faint smokiness, its inherent sweetness coating his palate. He basks in it as he does little else.

"I very much doubt that." He doesn't, he knows. The only family he's known has imprinted on him and obliterated all but traces of what came before.

"They would be no less welcome at my table were they your father's like or you mother's."

Mycroft wafts the fruited fragrance of his mulled wine toward himself as he might with any vino of good vintage. That he inhales too much will account for the burning in his eyes.

She grasps his narrow wrist. "Forty years, mon cœur, and you're still waiting for us to give you back."

"I have always been able to rely on my own company. It has yet to fault me." While Mycroft Holmes does not need other people, there are those he would care to keep close by.

Inside his wrist, she taps away at his pulse point like a waltz of thumbs on the heel of his palm.

"Many young birds fall from their nests and plummet to their deaths. You leapt out and flew off to build your own thinking yourself an intrusion. You were never an intrusion, neither before Sherlock nor after, and you needn't have built a wall of hatchlings around yourself to prove it."

Mycroft swallows his wine to the last dram. He is bad at these encounters, you see. His children come equipped with hearts inclined to give him leave in emotional matters. An embrace to speak what endearments fumble on his tongue, a kiss on the brow to quiet restless sleep; Machiavellian pragmatism conveys comfort enough most days. He does not blame his parents for leaving him small and doubting, only for his inability to believe that those he loves in life will stay.

"Just when I think I've got you and your brother figured out you surprise me one last time."

"I should think there's little you don't know about me anymore."

"You're a keeper of secrets and I uncover them. Christmas dinners would become dreadfully boring should that ever change."

"It's to the good that I'm something of a connoisseur of mysteries, then."

"Rather like your mother that way," she remarks cheekily.

"So I am," he chuckles in return.

She rises to refresh their beverages, pausing only to press a kiss to his hair as she passes. There are six glasses more to pour for the battle outside has been won by experience over logic, and the poor sportsmanship is audible for miles. Trust Mummy to know what's needed.

His mother is not only better at mysteries than either of her sons, she is better at love.

And Mycroft knows, as he has always done, that he is very lucky indeed.