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The scent of lemon polish, usually a comfort, hangs heavy and cloying in the air of the Pall Mall drawing-room, competing with the faint, sweet trace of disinfectant from the hospital. Mycroft, six years old and acutely aware of the dust motes dancing in the pale January light, adjusts the cuff of his sweater. It’s January 1984, the world outside a blur of grey London skies and the distant thrum of traffic, but in here, time has stretched and thinned, a prelude to something inevitable.
His mother, Violet, floats into the room, a whispered hush of fabric and soft smiles. She carries a bundle, swaddled in a pristine white blanket, and Mycroft’s gaze, usually so quick to dissect and categorize, snags on the miniature face peeking out. It’s impossibly small, a scrunched rosebud mouth, eyelids like fragile shells, and a fuzz of dark hair.
“Mycroft, dear,” Violet’s voice is a gentle chime, “come and meet your brother. This is William Sherlock Scott Holmes."
He approaches, every step measured, a nascent logician calculating angles and distances. The air around the bundle feels different, charged, as if a tiny, self-contained storm has entered their meticulously ordered universe. He peers closer, his nose twitching. The baby smells of milk and something else, something faintly metallic, like new pennies.
“He has a funny name,” Mycroft remarks, the words clipped and precise, echoing in the sudden silence of the room. It’s not a question, merely an observation, a statement of fact for his mother to process. He’s already cataloging the data, and the cadence is off, the syllables clashing in his internal linguistic library.
Violet’s smile softens, a ripple across her composed features. “It’s a family name, darling. A strong name.”
She glances up, catching sight of Siger, Mycroft’s father, framed in the doorway. Siger, always a formidable presence, now seems to fill the space entirely. His tweed jacket, usually impeccable, is slightly rumpled, a tell-tale sign of his own recent upheaval. Siger steps forward, his gaze, a sharper, more penetrating version of Mycroft’s own, settling on his eldest son.
“Funny, is it, Byron Mycroft Vernon Holmes?” His voice, a low rumble, carries the weight of unspoken expectations.
Mycroft blinks, a flicker of surprise in his preternaturally calm eyes. This isn’t a usual line of inquiry. His name has always been a solid, unassailable fact. His brain, a vast and intricate network of interconnected pathways, whirs into overdrive. His mind, the tidiest, most orderly space imaginable, a boundless repository of facts and figures, begins to process this new data. He considers the implications, the subtle shift in parental dynamic, the unexpected pressure. His ambition, a fragile, almost non-existent thing, feels a faint tremor. His energy, usually reserved for the quiet pursuit of knowledge within the confines of his own mind, stirs, a dormant beast stretching.
He looks at the baby again, this tiny, unassuming package of squalling potential. William Sherlock Scott Holmes. A gauntlet thrown, not by the baby, but for the baby. A future, as yet unwritten, begins to unfold in Mycroft’s mind, a complex equation with too many unknown variables. He watches the baby’s minuscule fingers clench and unclench, a silent, unconscious declaration. The sun dips lower, casting long, fractured shadows across the drawing-room. The lemon polish scent still lingers, but now, beneath it, Mycroft detects something else: the faint, sweet, and metallic smell of new life, a promise of chaos in an otherwise ordered world. His brain, a veritable engine of logic and deduction, has never been so acutely aware of the shifting currents of a family, the nascent forces of a future irrevocably tied to this small, surprisingly loud, human.
Mycroft bows, "Perhaps not. Welcome to the family, little brother."