I was going to wait, but then I didn’t.  I should have posted it on Wednesday, but I was busy learning about dead people.  Still, people seem to need a little something to remind them to have a little fun. 

This is a very (so very, sorry if you’re not used to my symbolic writing) strange and very long chapter, but my very favorite ones to write, I really wanted to expand a few of parts, but its just didn’t work.  Maybe I’ll AU later.  I debated about chapter order for ages, but I think this is the right order of things. 

So!  Enjoy!

Beted by Caroline, but I fiddled about after her edits, all errors are mine.,

---

At a safe distance
from his family, Roost held tight.  His
hand burned with a high throbbing pain, the feeling of being flailed and
destroyed.  He felt as though he were
sliding down the gullet of some long throated creature into his own grave.  The feeling overtook him of bobbing into place, of coming to a stop.

Knock,
knock, knock.

“Not by the hair
of my chinny, chin, chin,” Roost muttered.

He opened his
eyes.

He recognized the bedroom.

(He didn’t recognize
it at all.)

His fingers ticked
across the weave of the counterpane, his nails scratched over the texture of
the wallpaper. The door felt real against his palms, against his cheek.  It opened almost silent and he crossed into
the hall.  His feet settled on the dark
wood floor of 221B, then on the thin padding of the rug. (Eighty-five percent
of all American produced rugs are created within sixty miles of Dalton, Georgia.  Forty-five percent of the world’s carpeting
is supplied there.  Due to pricing a majority of corpses
disposed of in carpeting comes from Georgia.)

It
was too much, too much, too much.  Couldn’t trust his senses, had to trust
the internal regulatory system.

“You
need to focus,” Ormond told him.  Roost
looked at him, at his fine mustache, and the way he stood with his weight
slightly to the left.  Ready to spring,
ready to fight.  A face like the rising
dawn.

Roost
closed his eyes to cut down on the visual data.
(Individuals in sensory deprivation chambers frequently reported visual
and auditory hallucinations.)

He
could still feel the movement of the air in the room, the smell of
formaldehyde, paper, and the homey warmth of lived on upholstery.  Some other sense, something that vibrated
electric along the inside of his spine, made him aware of the height and
breadth of Ormond standing at his shoulder.

“You’re
not real anymore.”

“I’d
ask what is reality, but now isn’t
the best time to trigger your disassociation.
For the sake of this exercise, I’m
here.  I’m with you, Sherringford.”  His voice sounded wool soft, dun and
warm.  Familiar as Roost’s own bones.

“I’m
Rooster now.  Roost he calls me.”  He looked at him again.  Watched him tilt his head, smile.

Ormond
smiled and then they were in the Montague Street flat.  There was a yellow smiling face on the wall
(same), a slipper with his cigarettes inside (same), a dog by the fire
(different).  Sherringford stood tall, in
a suit, his hands steepled as he considered crime scene photos.  Roost covered his face, his mouth, his eyes
with the rounds of his palms.

“Do
you know where you are?”

“Yes.  I touched The Thing,” Roost told him and then
gagged, he pressed his fingers to his mouth to guard his words.  “I touched my part of The Thing and I was in
my room, it’s making me see.”

“And
then what happened?”

“Is
this a nest or a trap?”

“Yoohoo!”
Mrs. Hudson said at the door, her hand lifted.
Knock, knock, knock.  “Who wants a little cake?”

“Not
by the hair of my chinny, chin, chin,” Roost said.  His voice was wetter than he wanted it to be.

It
couldn’t tell the difference in his voice anyway.  It didn’t understand

It
threw Mrs. Hudson’s china plate against the wall and screamed and screamed and
screamed.  The sound a body without a
head made.  All breath and bellows with
no direction.

“None
for me thanks,” Sherringford said.

“Friend.”  Ormond put a hand on his shoulder, held onto
him.  “Hurry.”

“I
can’t, I never could without you.”

“I’m
here, I’m always here.”

“Tim
is an arrow, he can’t be lied to, he can’t be confused,” Roost winged.

“It’s
just bullheadness, your discernment
is better.”

“Davey
is fiercer,” Roost tried.

“You’re
kinder,” Ormond told him.  “You can’t
open every door through the bridle or the whip.
Sometimes you have to be nice to it.”

“I
can’t, don’t make me!”

“Everyone
must pay like you must pay.  Johnny’s
already done this, when he was your father.
He did it and he came back again, and that was the whole monster, he
took the whole thing and broke its spirit and broke it into pieces.  All you must face is a bit of postmortem
flinching of the nerves.  You don’t have
to be afraid.”

“But
he had to because he loved us.  How can
I?” Roost begged.

Ormond
laughed.  It wasn’t unkind.  It was like a giggle, just a few degrees to
the left.  “Because I’m going to be here,
guarding the door.  And if you don’t come
back and save me I’ll forget all about you, or you’ll forget all about me.”

Roost
came alive, snarled.  He took two fists
of Ormond’s shirt and charged him until his back hit the wall hard enough that Montague street fell away like the
sides of a trick box.  They stood in the
morgue and Roost slammed Ormond so all the drawers sprang open (all but one)
and they were all him and all his hearts where gone, cut out, burnt out, ripped
out.  “Don’t you dare threaten me with
death!”

Knock, knock, knock.

“Don’t
I mean anything?”  (Sherringford! he had screamed when Roost had gone over the
Falls.  He screamed it and screamed it
and screamed it.)

“Not
by the hair of my chinny, chin, chin,” Roost told him. He took a step back and
took a step back again.  He took hold of
the lock of the last unopened slab and he asked nicely.  “Please let me find out if I’m the weak
link.  Please help me help them get
home.”

The
slab opened.  He lay down.  Ormond kissed him on the forehead.  

(Mortuary
slabs were once made of slate.)

“Keep
track of what’s real,” Ormond told him.
“I’ll be here at the door.”

The
slab was slammed into the dark.

His
breath hit the top of the drawer and bounced back on his face, warm and
smelling of nothing.

The
metal walls vibrated so Roost’s bones rattled in his body.

Knock, knock, knock.

The
surprised snap of Roost’s inhale was twinned with the mechanical sound of
something on the other side of the door.

There
was a jolt, a rush.

C.
Auguste Dupin sat in front of the French queen, and Roost sat with him, a
shadow moving as he moved and remembering a chance he never had.  Surrounded by books at the address 221 in Faubourg Saint-Germain with his English
army doctor and his hobby of
conundrums.  

The
two of them watched the Queen, almost too stunned to apply ratiocination
(deduction), she had a way about her of sitting, of standing, of moving that
made her seem naked, seem clad in armor (seem ??????).  He had seen a parade of Parisian woman full
of their own pedigrees and fortunes, but none could have been called Woman more than she.  There was a quiet
energy about her, like the heat of
the sun on a summer’s noon, a grace that made the whole of the room artful by
her presence.  A sense of knowledge sat
upon her shoulder, as though she
knew the inner most chambers of the heart.
Dupin shook himself from the stunned awe in which he had sat at her
entrance with Jean trailing behind her and her attendant plodding along at her
shoulder.

“Your
Majesty,” John bowed his head, all reverence.
Raised as he was under the weight of England’s monarchy he was full of
the respect that the French used to hide their bayonets under.

“Please,”
she said, pinning back her veil, not even asking after the presence of the
Englishman.  “Today I am just Irene, just
a client.  It was my Christian name and I
have long missed it.”

“Madame
Irene then,” Auguste nodded.

“Someone
has stolen some personal letters from me,” Irene said, fingers pressing at a
locket at her throat – almost as though protecting it, while her manservant
stood quiet and neat at her shoulder.
His face had all the characteristic bullheadedness of a Slav, but of a
smaller stature, almost doll like in the gentle roundness of his features.  His furrowed brow as effective a deterrent as
any cutlass.

“Of
a personal nature?” Auguste asked.

Irene’s
eyes drifted to John.

“He
is entirely trustworthy, like your own manservant.”

“Maybe
not like him,” Irene said.  “Timofei is the surest arrow in my quiver.  He has made his efforts, but we are agreed
something more is required.  Our enemy is
slier, like a spider waiting on a great web.
He knows that I cannot risk my surest weapon, that I do not dare, and he
supposes that I am too ashamed to ask for help likewise.”

“Well, you have come to the very best,” Auguste indicated himself,
his piles of books, his piles of wine, his personal historian as John often
served.

Timofei snorted.  Even that
sound was full of Russian staidness.

“That is what I hoped,” Irene smiled.  Her hand moved and revealed an image of a
great dog, in its mouth the scales of justice.
(American make, meticulously kept, commissioned as a gift.  Godfrey.)

           Roost jolted fully back to himself.

“I hate to interrupt,” he paused, considered the figures stopped in
the middle of the conversation.
“Actually no, I don’t care, I want to get out of here.  Is the gun leaking here?  In this memory.  Is it broken here?”

“No,”
Timofei said, accent thick.  “Here it is
working, this is the way it was before taken apart, you must go closer to the
heart of the thing.”

Knock, knock, knock.

“It’s
coming,” he told Timofei.  

The
Russian seemed to hunker into himself.
Roost liked the word hunker,
it was decidedly descriptive and decidedly what Timofei was doing.  “If you say it is such.”

Ormond
opened the door to the hall, only instead of the hall it was someplace else, a
street.  His friend peered in, but made
no effort to do anything but observe the tableau.  “Do you know how to solve the mystery?”

“Maybe,”
Roost told him, “I’m not so good at that anymore.”

“Holmes
doesn’t think so, he’s often impressed by you.
You’ve proven to be a preternaturally gifted student.”

“Yes,
well, everyone looks clever the second time around.”

Ormond
laughed, almost a giggle.

“Yes,
I think I have it solved, at least most of the way.  I’d have to make a trip to be sure, but we
haven’t time for that.”  He crowed a bit
at the smile Ormond gave him, full of affection.

“Off
you go then, genius, you’ve another riddle to solve.”

Roost
strode through the opening, slipping as he went into a neat suit, and an ulster
coat that at times was more cape than anything else.  Adjusting his scarf, he sped up against the
rain up along the walk toward Montague Street that had now grown much
longer.  (It rained sixteen days on
average in London in April.)  He should
have taken a cab from the start and now he’d have to try to catch a cab looking
like a particularly ginger drowned rat.
Looking a bit Scottish too, which was sure to work against him.

“Sherringford!”
came a voice behind him with all the military focus that meant he was expected
to respond.  He spun on a heel and there
behind him Ormond half hung out of a cab door, holding a newspaper above his
head.  “Hurry and jump in before the
cabbie thinks better of it.”

It
took a moment, this wasn’t the warm teddy bear of a man Roost summoned up in
the too dark or the too bright of his mind.
Not the doorkeeper.  This was the
Ormond who’d wed once, and now never got to be.
Sherringford scampered to the cab, half hip-checking Ormond back into
the seat and slamming the door behind them.
The cabbie made a face like he was already regretting his charity.

“How
did you find me, Dr. Sacker?  I’m curious
as to your method.” Sherringford smiled at him, trying to be quiet about
sloshing off the water in his hair.

Ormond
tried not to giggle, but the laughter he was holding back in his throat still
illuminated his face.  “I’d like to say
something clever, like I know you like to walk when you’re on a case, or that
you walk at so many kilometers an hour and the distance between here and there
is so many kilometers and I just did the math keeping in mind the rate of foot
traffic at this date and time, but really I just happened to be passing by.”

“Luck
favors those who can’t meet the demands of genius.”

Ormond
sniffed, but looked pleased at being teased, his mustache ruffling in its own
language.  “I suppose if one must choose
between the two, luck is better.  Either
way we’ll get you back to Montague Street in a jiffy.”

“No!”
said Sherringford, starting forward so sharply the cabbie tapped the breaks in
surprise.  He reached out and grabbed
Ormond’s hand.  He looked at the man, how
his face was a little more square, a little longer, his nose a touch wider, his
hair a touch darker.  The callouses on
his hand were slightly different too, the sleek fullness of his moustache, the
minute twitches of his face.  He wasn’t
John in the way that John was John.

He
was…

Ormond
was dead.

William
Sherringford and David Mycroft Holmes had never been born and somehow that
meant the universe conspired.  That a
bird that flew by at just the right
moment and a Sacker turned right instead of left and Ormond’s parents never met.  Or someone forgot why they had walked into a
room and stood there three seconds longer than they had before and Ormond’s
parents had sex at two instead of two thirty and different sperm survived the
perilous journey, or the Sacker parents stayed in instead of going out and they
ended up with a child two years too early and completely skipped having a
little squarish army doctor the right year in favor of a little cardiologist
the year after.  A thousand other butterflies
flapped their wings and Ormond had never been.

Sherringford
squeezed Ormond’s hand.  

“Let’s
drive around, please, just for a little while.
I don’t want to go back yet.  I’ll
pay, double.”  He could feel the cabbie
paying attention from the front seat.

“Sherringford,”
Ormond said in his careful, careful way.
He could feel the way the man was HYPER AWARE of the hand curled over
his.  Could feel the needlepoints of his
tensed shoulders and the way he leaned just a little away from the back of the
seat and the dip down of his chin – just a hair, but then Sherringford had a
count of each hair on Ormond’s head.
“This case isn’t getting to you, is it?”

“No,
I just–  I just want to ride around with
you, for a while, in a cab.”

“Holding
hands?”

Sherringford’s
hand spasmed.

“Holding
hands it is then.”  He leaned back again,
made himself relax, cast an eye sideways at his friend, his flatmate, his
partner in crime solving.  “Uh, just keep
driving us around, cabbie.  If you don’t
mind.”

“Meters
running, I don’t care,” the man shrugged.

He
tried closing his eyes, tried just being there, but then he couldn’t see Ormond
anymore and a panic overtook him, so he sat quietly, head turned and watched
London slip by behind Ormond’s face.

“Hey–”

“You’re
my best friend, Ormond Sacker,” Roost told him.
“You’re my best friend and I love you and I never told you because I was
afraid.  I don’t know why, it seems so
easy now.  To say it now that it doesn’t
matter anymore.  We’re men from a
different age, from a different place, but here we are.  In a cab in London at the end of the world.”

“Not
the end, not yet,” Ormond said, his hand anchoring Roost’s.  “Why are you crying? You know you can tell me
what’s wrong.  I don’t care what it is,
cancer, death in the family, Gladstone ate your phone, I’m here all right?  I promised I’d stick by you and I mean it.”

“I
have to ask a question and I don’t want to because then I’ll have to say
goodbye.”

“You
won’t though, Sherringford.  Just ask.”

“Is-
Is this where it’s broken?”

Ormond
smiled at him, it was such a kind smile.
“No, Sherringford.  It’s not
broken here, you’re going to have to go farther down.”  

“Okay,”
he said and held Ormond’s hand tight in his.
“Okay, we can take more time though, can’t we?  More time to–”

There
was a tap at the cab window.  (A single
knuckle, tap ta-tap.)  “Roost.
John’s relying on you.  You have a
couple more diagnostics to do and then it’s his turn.”

He
turned to look, still holding Ormond’s hand, behind the glass of the door was
some kind of Victorian gentleman’s club.
The Diogenes, his mind supplied.

“I
don’t want to.”

“None
of them wanted to, Roost.”

He
felt himself wince, felt his head tilt from very far away, turned back in the
direction he thought his Ormond was.
“Sometimes I want you to be with me so much that I make myself believe
that you are and it makes me confused and afraid because I don’t always know
what’s real.  It’s been so many years, my head full of too many things
and too much noise and my feelings have changed.  They had too because everything changes and
you weren’t there to change with me.
I’ve become a different thing, strange and brotherly, and now none of
the things I used to wish I could tell you are true anymore except that I love
you.  Maybe I love you the way people
love perfect memories or mountains or stars, or stories.  People like stories. But that doesn’t mean I
love you any less for keeping me right and giving me an excuse to be good when
I didn’t think I was strong enough to be.”

Ormond’s
brows knit, the expression familiar.  

“I
know that was a lot and you…  It’s not
reasonable, not being a good friend, but I just–”

“Hey,”
Ormond said, voice soft.  “You know I am with you, right?  Every step of the way.  As much as I can be?”

“My
one fixed point,” Roost said and wiped away the tears.

“It’s
okay, Roost.  The detective and his
blogger, right?”

Roost
nodded once, twice, three times and slipped out the cab door with one, two,
three steps onto the soft carpeting.

He
heard Ormond, his personal pyschopomp, close
the door behind him and sniffed, making himself stand taller, pulling his suit
coat straighter.  He couldn’t feel his
fingers.

“I’m
sorry,” Ormond said.

“It’s
fine, he didn’t really die, did he?  He
was never really born after all.” He laughed because he didn’t know what else
to do.  He felt himself disassociating
slowly, like someone was peeling him off his body like the plastic cover on a
microwave dinner.

His
vision was blue and brown and green and orange.

“Roost,”
Ormond holding his hand said, voice sharp.
“Concentrate.  Come back to
yourself.  What are your senses telling
you?”

Five
things about Auntie: liked lines, liked hot chocolate, liked the painting of
the chicken, liked his future boots, liked it that Godfrey and Irene found each
other.

Four
things about David: had the alias Bad Davey, had two friends, had a razor under
his tongue, had been given the British Underworld.

Three
things about Roost:  the maned wolf is usually solitary, octopuses’ brain
is in their legs, bees dance to talk.

Two
things about Johnny: is kind, is angry.

One
thing about Dad: loved them.

He’d
made it, somehow, through the club and into the back room and into a chair
sitting across from Mycroft.  Fat, bland
faced, and sharp eyed as he sat at the heart of his empire.  “You have all the data, you just have to put
it together.”

“Ugh,”
Roost said,

“Come
on, Sherringford,” Mycroft said.  “I’m
supposed to be the lazy one.”

“I’ve
had just about enough of this.”

“I
wish you would apply yourself from time to time.  You have so much potential, but that is the problem
with a promising garden.  One can train
it up, but shouldn’t interfere too much once the roots are setting in.”

“I’m
tired of philosophy,” Roost sniped back at him.
“I just want to fix the thing and watch the British Bakeoff with my baby
brother.”

“Stop
whining, Roost.  You’re supposed to be
the one brave enough to be vulnerable like this.”

Going
still, Roost froze halfway out of his seat.
A sort of strange surprise weighted toward dread nestled in between his
lung and stomach.  “Bad Davey?”

He
laughed, resting his hands on his belly.
“Took you long enough.”

“But.”

“But
what?” Davey smiled at him.

“They
were all real.”  He sat down again.  “They’re all
real.”

“We’re all real,” Mycroft said.  

That
meant that…

How
did he feel about that?

He
felt happy?

He
couldn’t tell, he was still dizzy from disassociating.

“Are
you sure you’re yourself, you seem less…” he didn’t know how to say it.

Davey
just laughed.  "Less unhappy?  I’m not worried about hurting you on
accident.  I don’t have to be afraid for
you.  You won’t remember this.  I
won’t remember this.“

That
made Roost feel less happy.

"How
do you know?”

“I
would have told you about what you’d seen when you went in, told you what to
expect.  You would have warned John who’s
going after me and he had no idea.  Or
rather she.  It was great, she cursed me
out for like an hour.  Gorgeous
moment.  I’ll remember it for the rest of
however long I have before I’m punted out again."  The sharpness went
out of his eyes, or perhaps the edge of the blade turned away.  "I’m
sorry, Sherringford, for what’s coming.”

Roost
lost his breath.  He clutched at the arms
of his chair, his fingers tangling in the afghan Hudson had knit.  No.
The afghan wasn’t here.  It was at
221B.  He felt wood and satin and
surprise.

“Will
it be bad?”  As soon as he said it he
felt silly.  He’d always be a child to
Mycroft, to David.  He didn’t know how he
felt about that, but he felt a swell of affection for his brother.

“No.”  His face went quiet, went soft, in a way
Roost wasn’t used to seeing in him.  “Not
bad.  Just hard.  I’m not a very good brother.”

The
pun seemed obvious, but it didn’t feel like the time.  “You are though,” Roost told him, trying to
be brave again.  “You try really hard.”

“Do
I?”

He
wondered if this was how John felt all the time.  Good, powerful.  Like his heart was too big and too luminous
for his chest.  Roost smiled.  He wasn’t really good with words anyway.  He couldn’t always remember.  “Don’t ask me how,” he caved.  “It’s too many little things.  I’m good with finding them.  I’m not so good with putting them together
anymore.”

“It’s
kind of you to say.”

Roost
shrugged.  “Next to Dad, you’re the most
dangerous thing we know about, and we didn’t know about Dad for a long
time.  You just wanted to keep me away
from the dangerous stuff.  You know
better now, I think.  You’re better now,
I think, but you’ve always been good.”

“I
hope I do remember that,” Davey smiled, looked like his old self again.  Roost liked all the weight this Mycroft had,
it made him look huggable.  “How many
layers have you passed through, how far?”

“I
think this is the third, I’m not always good with these sort of things.  Space and time.  I had a spell in the middle there.”

“I
noticed, glad you’re back with us.  And
none of us are good with this stuff, Roost.
That’s our whole thing, we–”  His
head jerked, chin up, eyes narrowed, as though he’d heard something.  “See you later, bruv.  For whom does The Thing knock?  It knocks for me.”

Roost
heard a rustling, and turned to see Ormond holding open the door of a secret
passage.  He’d have to remember the
location.  Could he remember the
location?  Maybe they would remember,
maybe Davey just didn’t want to ruin the surprise.

David
could take care of himself.  He had his
own monsters to slay.

Ormond
stood at the open panel, his smile like the beginning of something
wonderful.  “It could be dangerous.”

Roost
laughed, because there was nothing else to do.
“Well, I suppose then I should go.”