Betaed by Caroline.  Trigger warning for discussion of depression and suicide, I tried to keep it light.  I thought it might be a nice Christmas present to have a few questions answered.

---

John woke up angry
and confused.  Angry he didn’t mind, he
usually felt angry.  Confused he had a
problem with.  He held onto the confusion
and the anger because certainty hid behind them.  The same certainty he’d had years ago,
looking at a serial killer through windows and over Sherlock’s shoulder.  He saw it in this strange mirror world, with
its clean 221B, and it’s older Sherlock.
He could smell it, hear it like a death keel.

In this universe
he’d killed himself.

He’d picked up the
gun like he’d always imagined, or let himself fall onto the subway on the way
back from Ella’s, or a million other possibilities he’d thought of.

This other older
Sherlock, when he’d come up the stairs raging like a madman, like a murderer,
for that one moment he’d looked at John and his face had cracked from top to
bottom and for a moment John had felt…

He’d felt
vindicated for all the pain Sherlock made him suffer, hated himself a little
for that, and he’d been certain, somehow, that he’d killed himself.

Then there had
been the boy who looked just like him, down to the pot handled ears his mum
used to tug at on good days.  She’d tell
him not to boil over.  On bad days she
tried to bring as little attention to him and Harry as possible.

For a moment the
broken terror on the boy’s face had made John think he’d…

But no, everyone
talked about Hamish with something
like worship.  Hamish would never have
lifted a finger against his boys.  That adoration
was a bit of a bitter pill.  Sherlock
wouldn’t give him the time of day and a whole household of people could hardly
live without Hamish.  It was more than that though, something had
happened.  Something big.  It was like he could see its shape under some
great sheet, but not what it was.  How could
he have done it with three children?  And
that Roost boy, he never would have left the boy if he could help it.  He had a brightness that reminded John of
Sherlock, but with a welcoming affection instead of a skulk.  How John had ever produced someone that lanky
was beyond him.  And then that little
boy, maybe all of fifteen, so not so little, but so like himself.  How could he have left his children?

Mary had
approached the question of what was happening with her usual practicality.  What needed to be done, doing it, and
thinking on it while she went.  A very
womanly way of dealing with problems, he thought, trusting oneself to work the
problem out.  He could do with being a
little more womanly.

She huffed as she
sat up, letting out a tight laugh as he helped her resettle her center of
gravity.

“Thank you, dear.”

He grunted.

“Come now, dear,
don’t you want to meet the East Wind?”

“Do you know what
the East Wind is?”

“I know you’re not
going to mansplain it to me,” she smiled back at him, fluttering her eyelashes
twice in a way that made him half amused, half enamored.  “But I take that it means something special
to Sherlock.”

“Mycroft used to
tell him the East Wind was coming to get him with the rest of the wicked.”

“Well,” Mary
said.  “We’ll just have to be very good
then.”

Whatever John’s
face looked like, it made Mary have to try not to laugh.  He didn’t like how pale and worried she
looked under her cheer.  He felt something
like an internal gravity pull him toward her.

“Are you alright,
Mary?”

Her face went
still, thoughtful.  “It occurred to me
that they aren’t going to let us leave this house.  That I may have to have this baby here.”

“If it comes to it
we’ll get you out.”  The certainty there
sounded weak, even to him.

“I know you’ll try
your best,” she told him.  “I’ve always
loved that about you.”  She pressed a
kiss to his cheek.  It was something to
the two of them, trying their best.
“Help me downstairs.”

She didn’t really
need the help, but she seemed to know when he needed to feel like she was
safe.  That he had a use.

Mostly that he had
a use.  If he was certain of one thing,
she didn’t need him to protect her.

The halls of the
house were covered in art he felt like he should know in a proliferation that
seemed suspicious.  The sort of thing he
noticed, but wasn’t smart enough to make the necessary deductive connections.  They moved down the narrow stairs to the
kitchen, the sort of understated, chrome covered kitchen that paid real money
to look like it hadn’t.  There was a man
sitting at the breakfast bar, one hand on his mug, another on the newspaper in
front of him.  When he looked up his eyes
looked the sort that sharks had.  Cold,
hard, and hungry for something.  He
watched them over the top of his mug for a moment and then looked back down to
his paper.

Next to him, made
almost invisible by the cold dead concern on the man’s face, was Mycroft looking
older and penitent.  He hadn’t aged as
well as the odd Sherlock had, seemed to be stuck between the self-knowledge of
his middle age and the indomitable establishment of his older years.  His hair looked watered down, much more
ginger, his face pinched.

He also looked
tired and apologetic.

When they took a
step farther into the room, there was his Sherlock, looking the right age if
not as happy.  There was a shine to his
face that made John’s belly tighten.  It
was something like panic.  All tightly
packed up and smoothed over, but panic nonetheless.  

“Sherlock?” he
tried.

Sherlock just
shook his head, once, tight.  Of course
he did, why would he tell John anything?
John was only useful as far as a case went before he went back to being
disposable again.  No, that wasn’t quite
fair.  It was important to be fair.

Something occurred
to John.  He turned to Mycroft, looked at
his pressed white lips and his clenched white hand on the handle of his
umbrella.  “Didn’t they say Bad Davey
would attack you if you came here?”

“There are some
things that are more important.”

“Like what?”

“I won’t lie and
say being kind,” Mycroft said, voice
quiet.

Sherlock laughed
once.  When Mycroft gave him a look,
grave and weighted, he shut his mouth with a hush of sound.

“Because there are
principles that must be upheld, because I would be less of a person if I
didn’t.”

“And you can’t
stand to be any less than anyone else, can you?” John said.

Mycroft made that
pinched face that was its own little victory.

“This seems like a
lot of smoke and mirrors.  A lot of
threats without anything behind it,” John said.
“He says this and she says that and it’s all very scary, but there’s no
proof of any of this.  We’re just trapped
in this house.”

Mycroft blinked at
him.  “I’m going to have to get used to
you being dull.”

John could feel
himself bristle an extra few inches to his height.

“I don’t mean any
offense by it.  Hamish had the particular
genius of reading intentions so well that he could seem preternatural.  It gave him a few strange blind spots, but
made him unsurpassable in others.  He’d
be able to look at this house and the people in it and know he was in danger in
a second.  There’s the fact that Sherlock
is afraid to serve as sign enough,” Mycroft pointed at his brother with his umbrella
and then over his shoulder at the windows.
“Then there’s the windows, all bulletproof.  The walls that are all a foot thick, the art
which is all both priceless and shows signs of being involved in the black
market.

“You’ve met the
other Watsons.  There’s something off
about them.  The way they move, the way
they look at people, the way they dress.”

There had been.

“Doesn’t John look
just a little too much like you?”

He did.

“There’s even
David’s man here, or perhaps John’s.  The
boy is already developing his father’s thrall.
But then so has David.  Sherlock
has already figured some of it out, but would you like to ask him how he came
to work for Bad Davey?”

John hated these
kind of games.

“How did you start
working for Bad Davey then?” John asked.

“I was sent to
assassinate his second in command,” the man said, looking up, eyes blank in the
front, but something burning low behind them.
It was like looking through one-sided glass.  The man seemed to realize euphemism wouldn’t
work and went for alarming honesty.  “Bad
Davey encouraged me to pull out all my teeth and eat them.”

John stared at
him.  He could feel the long seconds in
the man’s unflinching gaze and in his own shock.  He had to keep running the words around in
his head to make sense of them. “You’re joking.”

“I never joke
about Bad Davey,” the man said, pulling up the corner of his lip with his thumb
to show the pale artificial pink of his dentures.

“So you just work
for him now?” Mary asked.

The man lowered
his hand, set it down in front of him.
“They’re just teeth.  I could get
implants if dentures weren’t so convenient to hide things in.  He could have taken my hands, my eyes.  I wouldn’t have been able to shoot anymore.”

In one of those
Holmsian leaps of logic that John usually never got to have, he figured out
that the man was a soldier.  The man had been a soldier and was discharged
and had needed excitement just like John had and now he was sitting here with
dentures in his mouth.  John wondered if
anyone had asked him Afghanistan or Iraq?

The man swallowed,
his hands twitched on the newspaper.  “At
least I had a chance.  The man who sent
me to do the job sent me to what should have been my death.  Bad Davey actually protects the people
working for him.  He protects me now.  He’s hard, but hard like justice.”

That was
monstrous.

Monstrous and
understandable in a feudal way.

Bad Davey said danger and pull out your teeth and the man ran after him.

John had certainly
ran after someone who’d asked too much of him, who was he to judge.

“Still, powerful as he is,” Mycroft said.  “There are rules he must follow, that all the
Watsons must follow.  They can’t tell you
about what they are–”

“That’s the second
time that’s happened,” Sherlock interrupted.

Mycroft inclined
his head in question.

“What.  That’s the second time someone said what.
What they are.”

“I’m sure it was a
slip of the tongue,” the man said, his voice sounded somehow loaded and cocked,
lifted half out of its holster.  “I’m
sure Mr. Holmes meant to say who.”

“Who they are, of
course.” Mycroft’s voice was as crisp, as thin as expensive china.  “You’re coming at this all out of context,
looking at this from the wrong angle.”
He looked at his brother, his face creased by a sorrow that had been
aged like whiskey.  “I recognize the way
you look Sherlock, the way you looked here years ago.  If our worlds are alike then something
terrible might happen.  You need to
understand what happened here.”

“And we should
just trust you?”

“I’m relieved you’re
cautious, still you know my method.  I’m
still your brother.”

“Go ahead then,
Mycroft,” Sherlock said.  “You’re not a
Watson, you don’t have to follow the rules.
You can tell us whatever you want.
And you’re the one who knows the most, all the little pieces.  You’re the only one smart enough to put the
pieces together and tell us about it.”

Mycroft looked
down, adjusting his umbrella on the breakfast bar, while giving the impression
of looking at everyone at once.  “It’s
sometimes better to tell this part like a fairytale.”

“Once upon a time
there was a little boy?” Mary asked.

Mycroft smiled the
most nonsmile smile John had ever seen and he’d seen some.  “Something like that.  Two little orphan boys, babes in the wood.  All the boys had in the whole world was each
other and their big, enormous brains.  Hamish
and Timothy, although in those days Hamish may have gone by John.”

Mycroft lifted his
eyebrows, still looking down. “One day a man found them.  A scientist.
He flattered them, offered them gifts and friendship.  His name was Grendel, appropriately enough.”  Something happened to Mycroft’s face when he
said the name, a new level of revulsion, John’s stomach twisted into a
knot.  “They were still young.  He told them something convincing, something
woefully inaccurate.  ‘Since we’re such
good friends.  Why don’t you do this
experiment with me?  You’ll get to help
me with my very important work.’”

“Of course they
said yes,” John breathed out.

He smiled, slow
and frail.  He told them about Grendel’s genetic
engineering built an army of children, more intelligent, more dangerous, more disposable.  How the whole thing was beyond covert.  Mycroft laid out the facts the medical tests,
the child who killed his agents and was killed.
Told them about his broken mind and the equations carved into the meat
of his skin.

With all the
precision of pathologist Mycroft laid out the rotten corpse of the thing.  The first generation’s violence, ferocity, that
they lacked that line humanity demanded men not pass.  Told them all but one who learned what he
lacked, who loved somehow and bore his teeth at the world.

“Bad Davey,” Mary had
croaked.  “Head of the family.  All those children.”

Then had come the
second generation, less violent and less focused, brilliant minds and no
sensory filters.  Roost had been among
them once, and now handled dead bodies like discarded pieces of clothing. The
third generation met better success.  The
machinery Grendel had developed to advance the children’s brains less likely to
cause madness.  At four Dr. Watson was a
pocket-sized surgeon, fully trained, fully qualified.  With mechanical dispassion he laid out how
Grendel’s success destroyed him.  The
last generation was cohesive, intelligent, stable.

The children began
to organize.

“They revolted,”
John breathed out.  He saw in his mind
faceless children fighting against the only caregivers they had known, against
full-sized adult soldiers who had killed children before.  His voice did something wet and sorry.  “They tried to revolt.”  

“Yes.”

John stood up
quickly, paced in ragged steps, the rhythm uneven.  “John, the young John, he’s my clone?  Hamish’s clone?”

“In more ways than
one.”

“What about the
other children?” John asked.

“Johnny won’t talk
about some things, not to me.  But to
Sherlock.  He thinks the sun rises and
sets in Sherlock.  He adores him.”

“What did he tell
him then?” Sherlock asked, voice hoarse.

“The conflict
created a leak.  The brothers discovered
what had been done.  They would have put
a stop to it sooner if they knew.
Tighter than a knot those two, and with terrifying morality.  Tim is so stubborn he almost ruined two of my
best interrogators and Watson was even harder to pin down.  He had a multitude of pretty tricks, very
artsome.”  Something like temper flashed
through Mycroft’s frame.  Another crack
in his composure.  It unsettled John,
made him feel unbalanced.

“Grendel killed all
those children,” John said, then balked.
“They can’t have!  This is
Britain!”

“You’d be
surprised what Britain will do,” Mycroft told him.  “And it wasn’t strictly governmental.  Grendel didn’t seem to sort to enjoy
regulation.”

“Grendel used the
Watson’s DNA for the majority of his project,” Mary said.  

“Not just theirs,
but you’re essentially correct,” Mycroft said.
“Hamish had… quite a temper.  He
destroyed all of Grendel’s work, his facility, his notes, his staff, freed the
surviving children.  Watson wasn’t
satisfied cutting off the branches, he wanted to destroy the tree down to the
root.  He was most… precise in his work.”

John bet he was,
he would have followed Grendel to the ends of the earth.  Children.
John’s children!

“He needed to do
more than remove Grendel, he needed to protect his children from people Grendel
might use to help him with future projects,” Mycroft continued.

“Moriarty,”
Sherlock breathed out.  “That sort of
technology, disposable child soldiers.
Your enemies won’t fire on them, but the children are fully combat
trained.  You wouldn’t even have to grow
them yourself, with the help of that technology.  There are orphans everywhere, just hook them
up to the machinery.”

“Bad Davey was
given the criminal underworld,” Mycroft continued.  “He is like a dark sun in a dark system,
worlds of criminal activity orbiting him deep enough in the shadows that Moriarty
overlooked him, that even I overlooked him.
Davey kept in eye out for very specific things, specific patterns.  He cut the strings to Moriarty’s web out from
under him, slow and careful enough the man didn’t notice and then while
Moriarty balanced on a thin thread Bad Davey removed him.”

“Removed him?”
John asked.  “What does that mean?”

“Who can say what
the East Wind does with the chaff he blows away?” Mycroft said.  

“What about Roost
and Johnny?” John found himself asking.

“I haven’t figured
out what the plans for Roost are yet, but the boy is very like his father.  Very good.
 Johnny was given to Sherlock years ago
while Watson was still destroying Grendel.
Almost a year before Watson’s death.”

“Watson– Hamish
knew he was going to die that early then?” John asked and the entire weight of
Mycroft’s attention hit him in the center of the chest like a
sledgehammer.  He took a step back,
wavering at it.

“What an
interesting thing to say.”

“Not– Not really.”

“How did you know
Hamish killed himself?”

John trembled,
mouth pressed together.

“Oh,” Mycroft
sagged back. “In all of the factors I never figured in depression, I don’t know
why.  That would take the hesitation out
of the act once he was decided.  I
suppose I wanted everything to be clever, everything to be cold.  You’re very human, aren’t you?  I don’t suppose you have an opinion on why?”

“Everyone,” John
started and then stopped.  That wasn’t
where he wanted to take it.  “When you’re
a father it has to be the kids first, it always has to be the kids first even
when you take the afternoon off for a kip.
You’re getting your sanity back so you can stay a good parent for
them.  Those three boys knew too much,
had seen too much.”

He could feel
everyone look at him, feel them stare.  

He had to keep
going though or the thought would never get out of him, it would just circle
around and around.  “And Johnny was sent
to live with Sherlock, the obvious choice, but that meant he was around
Sherlock and you, and the two of you see everything.  I never would have done that if I wasn’t
worried someone else was already looking.  That and,” he had to rearrange his thoughts
under the scrutiny.  “I can tell already
I would have hated to be away from the boys.
I don’t know them well at all but I can tell I would have–  I’d just have to make sure any threats were
looking at me first, me last.  I’d– I’d
have to keep my children safe.”

Mycroft tilted his
head for John to go on.

“If the children
staged a revolt with Grendel, I would have to fight back harder to cover their
competence.  Have to take more of
Grendel’s angry pride for myself, offend him more than my boys.  If John was interesting I would have to be
more interesting.  If Roost and Davey
were odd, I would have to be odder.  And
then when the boys were safe, I’d have to make sure–” John swallowed.  “How did I do it?”

“Saint
Bart’s.  You tried to get Sherlock out of
the country, as far away as possible so he wouldn’t have to see and I
outmaneuvered myself and sent him there just in time.”  The guilt and pain clawed their way across
Mycroft’s face in a way that John had never seen and suddenly John knew that
this was the real Mycroft, that everything Mycroft said was true.  That admission looked like it had cost
Mycroft more than he’d ever paid in his life.

Sherlock made a
sound like he’d been gutted.

“That’s it, the
end of the story.  Happily ever after.”

“Is it?” Mary
asked.

“Bad Davey runs
the underworld, Roost has the British Government at his disposal, John has
Sherlock, Irene and Godfrey have distracted each other.  Timothy has a family.  Moriarty has found himself dropped into some
burning pit I don’t doubt. Watson got what he wanted.”

“Augustus
Milverton?” Sherlock asked.

“The newspaper man?
Belongs to Davey,” the dead-eyed man said.

“How?” Sherlock
leaned forward.

“Davey showed him
what happens to people who don’t know how to keep a civil tongue,” the man said
simply.

Part of John
thought that meant cutting out his tongue, but somehow he imagined what Davey
had in mind was worse.

“Baskerville?”
Sherlock pressed.

“No involvement,”
Mycroft answered, waving a dismissive hand.

“Mrs. Hudson?”

“Happily living at
Baker Street.”

“Me?” Mary asked.

“I don’t know,”
Mycroft admitted, “I’ve never seen you before.
I could locate you if you’d like.”

“I’d rather you
didn’t.”

Mycroft tilted his
head again.

“So, Davey’s
here,” John said.  “Hamish’s eldest
son.  He’s waiting somewhere here in the
house.”

“In the dining
room, sir.”  The dead-eyed man turned
back to his paper even as Mycroft stood.

“I suppose you
should go in,” Mycroft told them.  “I’ve
kept you long enough.  If you get
yourselves killed it will be your own fault.”

John took a step
toward the door when Davey’s man cleared his throat.

“Will you put your
gun on the table please, sir?” the man asked, not looking up.

A defensive heat
started in John’s sternum and curled up over his shoulders.  “What?”

“You have a habit
of keeping a gun at the small of your back.”

“How do you know
what my habits are?” John shot back.

“Dr. Watson has a
habit of keeping a gun at the small of his back, and he’s just like his
father.”

“Dr. Watson?” he
had that feeling of confusion and vertigo again.  “Johnny.
Mycroft said he’s a doctor.  This
whole place is impossible.”

“You’ve come from another universe, an exact
replica of the brother’s father.”

“I’m not their
father,” John said, feeling light headed.
It would be important to remember that.

“Just so, you’ll
still have to leave your gun behind.”

“John,” Mary said,
her voice had that new edge she’d just started using.  The hard, experienced edge.  He and that edge came to cross purposes
sometimes, but he trusted it.  “You
should leave your gun behind.”

He slid it out,
the separation like a loss of a limb, and set it in front of the man.  The dead-eyed man blinked once, nodded, and
went back to his paper.

Mary took John by
the hand and lead him away, pushing open the breakfast door and walking through
before he could get in front of her.  

And then there
they were.

A ginger man sat
at the table, his eyes burning dark, sometimes looking black and sometimes blue
in the light.  

John blinked, took
a breath, tried to keep breathing.  

Davey’s pale face
was all flexing muscle and sharp angles as if someone had starched and pressed
him into something barely sheathed.  Like
a razor blade.  In front of him there was
a wall of breakfast, too many pastries, too many silver platters with silver
lids, the heavy smell of bacon, of sausage, too many piles of split open fruit.

The man’s face,
the overburdened table, the way the man sat, long fingers ticking against the
embroidered tablecloth reminded John of some terrible fairy tale.  He couldn’t remember the rules for fairy
tales, were they supposed to eat, or supposed to avoid eating?

“Bad Davey?” Mary
asked, moving to the table.

The man looked
from Mary’s face, to her heavy stomach, to the wallpaper.

His pale face had
the waneness to it as though he’d been terribly ill not too long ago.  As though he was still spread thin and
exhausted.  There was tightness around
his mouth, dark shadows under his eyes.
It made him look savage, desperate.
It made the violence stand out under skin, like the bones on a starving
man.

He looked like
John when he woke the first time out of surgery.

He looked like he
was hurting.  It occurred to John with a
clunk that the ginger man missed his father.
It occurred to John that not all fathers were like his own, that he
wouldn’t be like his father.  It occurred
to him that Davey had lost a man that had understood what he’d done and
forgiven him and loved him and then died.

Greg sat to Davey
right, and blinked at the crowd that had come in, posture relaxed and plate
full.

“Hello,” John
said, wanting anything but to cause the man pain.

He looked at the
man looking at the wallpaper.  Davey
looked younger by the second, something crumpling in his face.

“Don’t tell me I
don’t have to talk to you.  Someone has
to,” Bad Davey leveled a look of utter contempt at him.  John had spent enough time around Harry to
know what it was really about, he didn’t take it personally.  “Don’t be kind
to me.”

That’s the kind of
father John was then.  A kind one who
taught his son to be a bulwark.  He stood
straighter, leveled a look of respect at the man.  He felt a flood of sadness.  Davey looked so put together, so in control
of himself.  He would have liked to have
known what the boy was like as a child.
He liked that Davey was angry, that he was ready to fight, he liked that
he was defending himself.  If the other
him was here, John thought he would have liked it too.

Greg cleared his
throat, not a little awkward and obvious about not knowing what was going on.

“Mycroft!” Davey
snapped and burst up to his feet.  

“I didn’t think
you’d prefer it if I just snuck out the back, I’ve done my duty and now I’ll
remove myself from the house.”

He pointed one
finger.  “I’ll remove you from the
house.  You are unbelievable.”  He bristled
with menace, like a wild fox trapped in a crate.  He seized a pomegranate from the table and
with brute force rent it.  Seeds and
fruit exploded over the table, bounced off everyone in the blast zone, bled
down his pale hands.

“Of course,”
Mycroft said.  “I understand.”

“At least someone
does, I’m working with amateurs.”

“Sir,” the dead-eyed
man said, relaxed at the shoulders as he held the door open for Mycroft’s exit.

“Don’t you sir me, I will become very displeased
with you, I will throw you out a window!
It’ll be a rainy day fluro socks before I’ll put up with your sass.”

“Of course,
sir.”  The man looked entirely
unconcerned.

Davey threw his
arms up in the air, the implicit threat explicitly gone.  He looked prickly, dangerous, but
amiable.  Willing to listen to them at
least.  He sank back down into his seat
and claimed a tea pot in a plaid cozy for himself.  “This is what I have to work with.  My life is tragedy.  Everyone might as well have breakfast.”