Make a List!

"Mike, have you heard anything from Sherlock?"

For no reason other than the words, even said in such a cheerful tone of voice, Mycroft's fingers seized around the phone. "No," he replied bluntly, and then went on for the pertinent questions. "Why?"

"Oh, he was do back this morning, but he never came. Well, I'm sure he's alright," his mother continued. "He and his friend probably just slept late, I'll try ringing him later."

The same sense of unease prickled at the back of his neck. "Who's his friend?"

"Oh, some chap named William. He sounds nice. Sherlock said his mother was fine with him staying over."

"Right," Mycroft replied crisply. "I'm afraid that I'm quite busy, Mother, so I'll have to talk to you later." When he put the phone back into its cradle, he immediately sprang for his coat and ran down the stairs of his flat.

Sherlock didn't have a friend named William. Better still, Sherlock did not have friends at all.

Mycroft might not spend his time at home with his irritatingly intelligent brother any longer, but the weekend visits had been enough. It was obvious to see, except to their parents, apparently. Bless his mother, but her smarts seemed to have been left in maths. Also, the fact remained that if you wanted to remain blind to something, most people would.

Mycroft, however, remained blind to nothing.

Sherlock had snapped off that the bloodshot eyes were product of sixth form, staying up late to study. Mother ate it up; Mycroft knew that Sherlock did not need to study for anything that that school was teaching. Sherlock had read the textbooks many times over before sixth form, having stolen them from Mycroft when he thought he wasn't looking.

Perhaps the lack of appetite wasn't such a strange thing, either, as Sherlock was invariably the most picky eater than Mycroft had ever had the displeasure of being in company with. While he would eat his boiled spinach, Sherlock would fling it onto the wall (usually when he was younger, but he had done something of the same vein when he had been fifteen, too). But Sherlock begging off dinner for three nights in a row, according to his mother when she called nightly (God save him), was strange, especially when she went to extremes to make his comfort food that he also did not touch.

When Mycroft had seen him a week and a half later, he deduced that Sherlock had lost three pounds.

Coerced into staying over one night after being invited over for the holiday, Sherlock had snuck out. When he'd come back, reeking of cologne that he never used (too strong, too hard on Sherlock's fine-tuned sense of smell), Mycroft had skipped the confrontation in favor of getting out of the flat early in the morning, but couldn't help thinking what are you trying to cover up? as he laid in his old bed and stared at the ceiling.

As if he really needed to guess.

He supposed that, while the rest of their world remained selectively blind to Sherlock's problem, he had been being selectively stupid.

It was easy to track Sherlock's mobile once Mycroft was in the back of the cab. He hadn't had a trace on his little brother's phone, but he would have to set one up immediately following this. It was slightly more difficult to look up names and numbers for rehabilitation clinics to pass the time on the way there, but these were things that needed to be done and so Mycroft would do it. He would be the one to pick up pen and paper and outline the steps for Sherlock in a simple way that his addicted mind would be able to understand. He would be the one to pick up his brother from this destruction that he had laid upon himself.

Mycroft smoothed down his coat and brushed a smudge of dirt from his vest as he walked forward, having pushed his way into the abandoned building where the sleeping beasts lie. He swiped the broken chain of his watch from the ground and tucked it into his pocket with the watch itself, and ascended the stairs.

His brother was sprawled out bonelessly on nothing more than a pile of rags, flickering candlelight illuminating the shadows under his eyes and the sheen of sweat on his face. Mycroft pursed his lips and crossed his arms as he stopped next to him. "Brother mine."

Clouded eyes locked onto his, and the emotion that crept onto Sherlock's face may have been a snarl if he wasn't so vulnerable looking beneath the sweat and spit and haze of drugs.

Mycroft sighed and knelt onto the filthy ground, pressing two fingers against Sherlock's pulse. It was racing.

Sherlock swatted at his hand with a growled complaint; Mycroft caught his wrist and held onto it tightly. "Stop."

"Ow! You're hurting me!"

"Enough of this," Mycroft replied sharply. "No more, Sherlock, it's gone on long enough."

Sherlock stared up at him warily, as the glare softened into something not as hideous, and the angered defence fell out of usually keen eyes. His arm went limp in Mycroft's grip, and he shifted his gaze away to gaze at the ceiling.

It was like he had been waiting for someone to say that.

Maybe, all this time, he had been.

Mycroft folded his legs beneath him and pulled the notepad from his pocket. He pressed it into Sherlock's limp hand, followed it up with a pen, and said "You're going to make a list, and then we're going to decide if you need to go to hospital."

"... a list of what?" Sherlock muttered groggily.

"Of what you took," Mycroft replied simply. "Everything that you are currently high on. Write it down."

Sherlock stared into the void for a moment longer before rolling over onto his stomach, and Mycroft watched with a face devoid of emotion as Sherlock began to write down the drugs.

It wasn't as though he wasn't angry at Sherlock for doing this; he was. But he understood, if only partially, what Sherlock was going through. Daily life rarely gave people of their intelligence anything substantial to go on. Sherlock complained regularly of being bored, ever since he was young. The boredom had been combatted for a time with the arrival of Redbeard, but when the old dog had been put down, perhaps that could have been a final step towards this outcome. Redbeard had gone, and Mycroft had moved out. He and Sherlock were never particularly on good terms, but Mycroft loved his brother more than his brother could ever know.

The crave of stimulation wasn't foreign to Mycroft. He hadn't gone this far himself, but on the few sparing occasions that he had snuck a cigarette in the back of their flat and their mother had cracked the dish towel against his thigh in punishment, he understood the appeal of this sort of thing. But he had gotten out of the house, gotten settled into his life away from the watchful eye of professors and parents, and he was, more or less, able to fill the void in his brain in the meantime.

Sherlock had meaningless classes full of topics he did not care about, and had, for almost ten years now, been told that he was chasing a fantasy by New Scotland Yard as he tried to help solve London's murders in his downtime.

The drug use was not good; it was, however, not completely a surprise.

And Mycroft was angry at Sherlock for choosing to go this route. Angry that he would risk his life and that brain that he cherished so much for the high that these stimulants - as Mycroft read the paper from an angle - gave him. But mostly, he was disappointed. Disappointed not exactly in Sherlock, but the people around him. They were the ones who hadn't noticed; in his case, he had been the one who had noticed and had chosen to not say anything until just now. He had failed in protecting his younger brother once again. Disappointment and sadness were hand-in-hand, and watching Sherlock's fingers shake as he scratched out faint letters in his words, both were weighing heavy on Mycroft's shoulders - and his heart.

"Here," Sherlock grunted, flinging the notebook back at Mycroft.

It fell short of him, and Mycroft leaned forward to pick it up, producing the folded up piece of paper from his own pocket. "Here," he echoed, holding the paper in front of Sherlock's face.

Sherlock sighed slowly, reaching up to swipe it from Mycroft's grip.

"I made a list, too," Mycroft said, glimpsing down the cocktail of drugs that Sherlock had taken. Mycroft's list, on the other hand, was the list of rehab centers.

Sherlock was silent a long while, before his fingers curled tightly around the slip of paper, and his hand dropped to his chest. "... pick one."

Mycroft, if he were prone to outbursts of brotherly compassion, may have smiled. As it were, he did not, even if he did allow himself a brief sigh of relief as he settled in. "You're going to come down, Sherlock, and then we'll pick one together."

Sherlock muttered something that was lost in between the haze of drugs, and Mycroft did not press him on it.

Instead, he sat silently, hands in his lap and his eyes on his little brother as Sherlock drifted in and out of consciousness and lucidness. He mumbled and gasped and clawed at the blankets in the thoroughs of whatever nightmare his magnificent brain was creating.

Mycroft simply combed his hair out of his face and wiped the sweat from his eyes and continued to sit silently to wait out this trial. Because that was what it was, a trial. Sherlock would come out of this. He would walk through fire and claw his way to the precipice of being clean and immerse himself back into it, if he had truly decided to get help.

He was Sherlock Holmes, after all. Mycroft Holmes's little brother. If anyone could do it, it was him. And if Sherlock needed the help - even if he thought that he didn't - Mycroft would make sure he'd be ready with the list if Sherlock was prepared to be ready with his own.

I love everything about this dynamic and I'm not exactly sure this was the way I intended this story to go when I set out to write it, but I do not dislike it. (Also, is this the first time I've written Mycroft's POV? Well, I know it doesn't happen often, so I hope it's not bad! Dx)

My initial reaction is that Sherlock should be immediately carted off to hospital, but nobody was rushing around to do that there in tAB, and Mycroft didn't seem to be anywhere near that level of urgency in the flashback, so I didn't write it that way. Respective ages here are around 27 and 20, in case you were wondering.

I do not own Sherlock. Thanks for reading!