Chapter Text
2005
Mycroft sat in a stained armchair watching Sherlock, unconscious in a hospital bed and as pale as the sheets. The glare of the fluorescent lights somehow overpowered the sun coming in through the cheap blinds. Sherlock’s breathing was steady but shallow. The machines beeped in a surprisingly comforting rhythm, and, for the last half hour, showed an almost imperceptibly increasing heart rate.
This was Sherlock’s fourth trip to hospital in as many years. After he dropped out of university, Sherlock treated his drug use as a science experiment, testing the purity, tracking the availability of different drugs through distribution networks, and experimenting on himself to discover the different effects of the particular mix. That eventually became just an excuse for another hit before he abandoned the pretence altogether, dropped out, and coasted from one seedy bed-sit to a dirty mattress in a council estate to a park bench.
Once Sherlock’s youthful, rebellious drug use turned into an addiction, Mycroft researched his drugs of choice. At the time, he had recently been granted access to most government databases—he reviewed police crime statistics, local and international distribution patterns, and dealers’ methods for sales. Medical information on the effect of illegal drugs and combinations of those drugs was readily available. He became an expert, laser-focused on helping address the causes of Sherlock’s dangerous needs. All that got him was anger and withdrawal—as well as rejection by his parents and the absence of any semblance of a healthy lifestyle, possibly as dependent on his need to care for his brother as Sherlock was on his drugs.
Seething with a mix of anger and helplessness, he glanced at the bag of filthy clothes Sherlock had worn until an unlucky nurse stripped him while he literally kicked and screamed. Mycroft’s efforts to help Sherlock had consistently backfired, pushing them further and further apart until everything Mycroft did was the subject of a bullying joke—to Sherlock he was fat, selfish, nagging, nosy, and ignorant of humanity. An annoyance to be deceived and manipulated. Or ignored.
Mycroft had given up active efforts to intervene and resorted to mostly hoping and supporting him for the past two years. But the start of this strategy coincided with Sherlock’s increasingly reckless behaviour. He had begun mixing heroin and cocaine with whatever else the various dealers had available.
What are my options? Mycroft wondered for the ten-thousandth time. Protecting and mentoring him had long since stopped working. Ignoring him seemed to make it worse. Drug rehab or hospitalisations bored Sherlock as soon as he fully regained consciousness and mobility. Their parents pretended everything was fine—Mycroft’s involvement in Sherlock’s treatment typically meant they didn’t need to acknowledge it.
He allowed his efforts over the years to float through his mind, analysing which had been more successful than others. They were all similar ways of convincing Sherlock to resist his baser compulsions. All focused on the demand side of Sherlock’s addiction. Hmmm…simple economic theory…
One of his several master’s degrees was in economics, which overall was a ridiculous field, full of assumptions of perfect information and rational behaviour. But the concept of supply and demand was real. The dim outline of an idea started to form…perhaps he needed to focus on the supply.
The speed of the beeping increased. Sherlock inhaled suddenly and cleared his throat.
“Stop looking at me,” Sherlock croaked before his eyes opened.
“I am merely a passive observer. I am here solely to be here.”
His brother moaned and rolled onto his side, facing the far wall. Mycroft listened as the beeping gradually slowed back down and his breathing evened out. Unconscious again or asleep.
Mycroft shifted down into the chair, resting his head against its back and closing his eyes. He had things to consider.
2006
The initial planning took time and patience. During Mycroft’s early years collaborating with the intelligence agencies, his group developed a code to use to disrupt the CCTV in an area without leaving an electronic record of the interference. Because London was one of the most surveilled cities in the world, secrecy was sometimes a requirement. It was useful for the off-the-books agency he worked for; it was especially useful for his planned extracurricular activities.
Mycroft had to be careful surveilling Sherlock as long as his viewing history remained traceable, watching helplessly as Sherlock skulked in various dark corners or seedy pubs. Mycroft’s spotty access, coupled with Sherlock’s instinctive ability to hide from view, made it difficult to discern the purpose of many of these outings until he landed back in hospital. He used this time to build up his reputation as the man-who-gets-things-done, even if that meant he had to disappear and become untraceable for a few days or longer. He received added training in hand-to-hand combat, weapons, and accessing secured locations. There were benefits to being ensconced in what the Americans had started to call the “dark government.” He could wait.
When Mycroft finally received sufficient security clearance that his own access to the system was virtually untraceable, he frequently sat in his dimly lit home office, watching on his laptop for the beginning of his brother’s next drug-fuelled disappearance. He could have delegated some of the tasks of monitoring, but he had never fully trusted any other human—every single one of them, even the marginally competent ones, was a traitor in waiting.
No doctor questioned a man at his level about a request for an occasional benzodiazepine prescription. He was cautious not to make too much of a medical record of stress or sleep issues, but in this day and age “taking care of your mental health” was accepted as a best practice. And even though Sherlock was the family chemist, it was a simple process to purify and concentrate the benzodiazepine. To mask its original, prescription source, he added some readily available adulterants. The resulting solution could be mixed into heroin to make an extraordinarily dangerous combination.
He idly scratched his chin, running his fingernails through the day’s stubble, as he flipped absently through still images on his laptop off the day’s CCTV feeds. His plans were helped by the fact that drug dealers were predictable—they had to be. Much like sex workers, they needed to be in the same location at the same time to develop a clientele. Mycroft had long ago arranged for Sherlock’s flat and the surrounding area to be well-monitored by cameras, so it now was a matter of waiting. Cat-and-mouse. Or fishing. He huffed in amusement at the odd mental state he found himself in. I am desperate enough to use my brother as bait. Finding no new information from the day’s feeds, he shut the laptop and, staring into the darkness, thought through another dozen scenarios to evaluate the risks.
2007
Mycroft returned home, exhausted from a three-hour phone call to finish the day. As soon as he laid down in bed and closed his eyes, he realised he had yet not checked on Sherlock; the thought drove off any chance of imminent sleep. Sighing, he reached for his reading glasses and turned on his laptop. Scanning through the last few hours of video, he watched as the normal cast of characters sauntered through his brother’s most recent squalid building. Sherlock’s neighbour ran out the door, late as usual for his job at Tesco; the elderly man down the hall slammed his door behind him, yelling wildly on his phone; two pop-eyed chihuahuas tussled while their owner tried to untangle their leads.
He sat straighter when a new person walked down Sherlock’s hallway. Flipping to the camera in Sherlock’s flat, successfully hidden only because Sherlock was barely functioning, he watched as the man entered. He pulled a small bag from his pocket, and threw it at Sherlock, who threw back a fairly thick roll of cash, held together with an elastic. He had found his first prospect.
Mycroft followed him for over a fortnight by CCTV, learning his patterns and his territory. The prospect, called Rimzee, tended to fall down when the pubs closed, drunk on cheap gin and occasionally high. He lived alone and rarely took a woman to his place, protective of his stash of drugs, so a quiet entry to his flat an hour after Rimzee’s normal bedtime was the most likely time to find him asleep and the least likely time to be noticed.
The following Thursday, Mycroft went off the grid. He had a series of very sensitive meetings set with a Russian spy who was interested in being turned to help Mycroft’s group, which were not coincidentally set near a certain drug dealer’s flat. It was a lovely cover for a murder.
The next night, he waited outside of Rimzee’s favourite pub, and the man careened out at the expected time, stumbling slightly over the threshold. Mycroft didn’t make a move to follow him, staring at his phone to confirm his return to his flat through the one functioning camera along the route. Disrupting that and several nearby cameras, Mycroft waited an hour and picked the lock on the front door to the building and to the flat, his gloved hands steady and quick.
The flat was dark and silent except for some quiet snores from the bedroom. Rimzee’s hiding place for drugs was obvious to Mycroft but otherwise sensible–behind a stack of old magazines on a small bookshelf doubling as a nightstand by his bed. The rest of the shelves were filled mostly with junk–a pizza box, some old trainers, a few glasses likely filled with mould. Nothing that would be tempting for an occasional one-night-stand to rifle through, but easily and quickly accessed for a sale.
Mycroft pulled the inhalant that was quietly used for very off-books renditions out of his pocket and held it near the dealer’s mouth. Despite popular fiction, none of the inhaled anaesthetics administered in this way were instantaneous, but several minutes of quiet hovering should ensure that an intoxicated person would not wake from a shot in the arm. The modernised ether compound was a substance that was not tested for in any normal toxicology report. Mycroft also had the advantage that London’s police force was unlikely to devote many resources to a junkie dying in his own flat at three in the morning.
After a few minutes, Mycroft detected the signs that the man had slipped from sleep into unconsciousness. Reaching into the space behind the magazines, it was a simple process to add the benzodiazepine concentrate to the heroin and inject it. He left the needle sticking out of his arm to avoid any subtlety about the situation, checked around to confirm he had left no trace, and let himself out of the flat.
He slept well for the next few hours and felt calm and rested during his next encounter with the spy. By the time he left their outing in the park, he was confident the young woman would turn. He allowed himself a few seconds to congratulate himself for his success with her and suppressed any further analysis of his earlier efforts.