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Sherlock Holmes, age twelve, ran full speed out of the cottage, his school scarf flapping behind him and a canvas sack clutched in one hand. His open coat caught the air and billowed as much as a short-length wool coat could do, and if he wasn’t so desperate to get away, he might have been grateful that it was at least not raining. Bitterly cold, overcast, and the fog was creeping in from the coast, but it wasn’t raining.
Small favors.
“Sherlock!”
The cook-general, at the door, shouting into the mist. Sherlock reached the trees and skidded to a stop, his clunky school shoes catching leaves and dirt. He’d have to clean them before morning, or the Headmaster would make him sit through another God-awful lecture on cleanliness and how one presented himself to the world. Predictable, and not just because Sherlock had sat through the lecture half a dozen times already, and it was only the beginning of December.
Cook was still looking for him. Sherlock leaned against the tree and tried to catch his breath. The cold, damp air hurt going in, and wasn’t much better going out, and Sherlock coughed and shook and tried to do up the buttons on his coat. Buttons, ought to have been a zipper or at least snaps, stupid traditions…when did a tradition ever do anyone any good? If his coat had a zipper he’d have been warm already. No use holding onto the past when the present offered a better solution.
Hmm, that was quite good. Sherlock took the thought and carved it deeper into his memory, like carving initials into a tree. Solid and sturdy and unlikely to go anywhere, except up.
Cook had stopped shouting. Sherlock took a chance a peered around the tree.
Fog. Fog, everywhere. He might have been in the middle of the forest, instead of at the end of the garden of his own house. No wonder Cook had stopped looking; finding him was a lost cause, if he wasn’t willing to be found.
Sherlock pushed off from the tree and headed off into the forest, the canvas sack slung over one shoulder. Fog or not fog, he wasn’t lost; every tree was a memory, and Sherlock didn’t ever forget anything worth remembering. Within minutes he found the little campsite with the small hut in the clearing. He dropped the sack on the ground and went to work setting up a fire. Hard going; it might not have been raining then, but it’d rained considerably recently, and wet wood didn’t particularly want to burn. Sherlock had gone through most of his matches and was succeeding only in setting fire to his fingers when he heard the footstep on the leaves just outside the tree line.
“I told you not to follow me!” Sherlock shouted angrily, but Mycroft appeared a moment later anyway.
“Who said I did?” asked Mycroft mildly, and came forward, carrying an armful of wood. The same wood as the pile which had lain next to the fireplace in the sitting room. Sherlock scowled, and watched as Mycroft expertly began to replace the damp sticks with the cured and carefully dried blocks.
“You’re here, aren’t you?”
“And isn’t your stomach grateful?” replied Mycroft. “Hand me the newspaper.”
Sherlock did, but not before twisting it up the way Mycroft himself had taught him seven summers before. When Mycroft was twelve, and Sherlock was five, and they’d go rambling in the woods and Sherlock had told his brother everything there was to know because it only mattered if Mycroft knew it.
And now Sherlock was twelve, and Mycroft was nineteen, and uni had turned him into an utter prat, because he had finally discovered the same thing.
“What did you manage to grab?” asked Mycroft, stacking the firewood.
“I don’t have enough for three.”
“Aren’t we lucky there’s only two of us.”
“You eat enough for two,” muttered Sherlock, and hid his nose under his scarf. Mycroft kept stacking wood. “Toast. Cheese. A jar of fig preserves.”
“What kind of cheese?”
“Manchego. Some of those pears from America, the kind Mummy orders in specially.”
“They won’t be ripe until tomorrow.”
“They’re already ripe, no one’s checked them yet or they would have known.”
Mycroft nodded. “Knives should still be in the trunk.”
“I know that,” snapped Sherlock, and spun around to fetch them.
The fire was going by the time he came back. Mycroft was warming his hands.
“Last year of school,” said Mycroft casually, and Sherlock wrapped his arms around his stomach as if it didn’t hurt.
“No, it isn’t.”
“Last year here, I mean.”
“I’ve got years of school left. Heaps of it. Ten years, and that’s if I don’t go on to post-graduate studies. I might stay in school my whole life, you know.”
“I know.”
“Be one of those people who never leave. Perpetual students. Like a perpetual motion machine, except the student versions actually exist. I’d be one. Always learning something else, one class shy of being able to graduate so they’d never be able to force me out. I could just stay there.”
Sherlock heard the wistfulness in his voice, and shook his head as if to shake it off. “Stupid.”
“No,” said Mycroft quietly. “Not really.” He reached into the fire, or at least it seemed that way to Sherlock, and pulled out a metal thermos. “I brought water for tea. Should be hot enough now.”
Sherlock wrinkled his nose. “It’ll taste like aluminum.”
Mycroft screwed open the top and pulled the teabags from his pocket to drop them in. “Perhaps.”
“It will.”
Mycroft screwed the top back on again and set it next to the trunk serving as his backrest. “They’re not kicking you out of school, Sherlock. You’ve just learned all they have to teach you.”
“I did that last year. They don’t mind me staying.”
“That’s different. Eton wasn’t ready for you yet.” Mycroft chuckled. “I dare say they won’t be ready for you next year either, but that’s their problem.”
Sherlock renewed his glare at Mycroft, who only chuckled in response.
“Well, hand it over,” said Mycroft, reaching out.
Sherlock pulled the bread out of the sack and gave it to him, along with the bread knife and cutting board obtained from the supply trunk inside the hut. Neither of them spoke as they worked, slicing the bread and setting it on the toasting forks, spreading the fig preserves on the toast, topped with sliced pears and the cheese. Sherlock ate as many slices of pear as he handed to Mycroft, who didn’t say a word, and didn’t take a single bit of cheese for himself. Sherlock noted, and sulked quietly, because it meant he couldn’t tease Mycroft about it.
Mycroft probably knew that, too.
When the toasts were all done, laid out neatly on the plates balancing on their knees, Mycroft poured out the tea. It was piping hot, sweet and strong, and Sherlock drank it in large gulps between bites of toast. The pears were perfect, sweet and tart in the right amounts, the fig preserves were loaded with every good flavor found in a spice rack, the cheese oozed between Sherlock’s fingers and he had to lick it off or risk burning himself again. It was almost a shame to wash down the flavors with the tea, and so every time Sherlock did, he found himself reaching for another slice of toast, until they were all gone.
Mycroft was leaning against the tree trunk, eyes closed. “Did I ever tell you the only thing I disliked about Eton?”
Sherlock might have responded with an insult. But his stomach was full, and he was feeling content with everything, including his brother. “No.”
His response might have been curt, but Mycroft understood. “The kitchens. They don’t allow students in them.”
Sherlock closed his mouth tightly. Not to keep in the insult – because rarely did Mycroft offer him such a tempting silver platter – but because the thought of being unable to access anything was abhorrent.
And for some reason, the fact that it was the kitchens made it all the worse.
Just like that, Sherlock felt a sort of pain in his chest. It could have been the tea, or the toast, or sitting on the shockingly cold ground. It was none of those things. It was the idea of five years of his life, being unable to sit in a warm kitchen, watching the food be made, learning how to make it himself, the manipulation of flour to dough to bread, and all the bits in between…
“Sometimes,” said Mycroft, carefully picking through the words as if to make certain he said them correctly, “we have to learn to live without what it is we want, in order to understand how much it is we need it.”
Sherlock swallowed hard.
“Maybe not ten years of school,” he said cautiously, and Mycroft smiled and held out the thermos to pour his younger brother another cup of tea.