Forgetting the Past

        Below my bare arms I could feel a chintzy cotton and polyester blend.  The firmness of the aluminium alloy below the thin waterproof padding that supported my back dug into my posterior.  The smell of smoke still surrounded me, now mingled with the crisp, ethanolic tartness of antiseptic. On a gurney in A&E, then. 
        I slowly attempted a slight shift to the right, immediately feeling the peculiar sensation of metal against bone.  My hip was still out of alignment.  The pain was far less than it had been, though, before I apparently lost consciousness.  My eyelids resisted my will, refusing to yield as I struggled to force them open.  Every one of my senses was gathering information and there was nothing familiar around me at all.  
        There were hurried footsteps - three sets - on the tile flooring.  One pair of New Balance trainers.  A nurse. One pair of Selena high heels. Anthea. One pair of Tod's lace-ups. They were glossed, black leather.  Wingtipped with the most intricately designed and beautiful perforations.  £870 plus gift wrapping.  My most recent birthday gift to Greg.  
        "His vitals are stable.  He'll be fine."  The nurse's voice was terribly high-pitched.  The urgency carried in her Scouse accent betrayed her words.
        A second, perfectly gravelly voice began, "Is he conscious?"  Greg.  The only voice I wanted to hear made my heart race, while I felt my shoulders and neck release.  He was alive and walking. He was speaking coherently.  Could he really be alright?  
        "Greg?"  His name escaped my mouth in a dry whisper, barely audible even to me. 
        I heard the metal feet of a chair slide across the floor, landing near to my shoulder.  Greg sat. He smelled of smoke as well, but the spice of his skin, his natural scent that could only be compared to the warmth of a thick jumper, lingered beside me. 
        "I'm here," he said quietly, his rough hand moving to rest on my forearm. His voice was weak.  I opened my eyes again slightly to see his chest expand, awkwardly recovering from just a couple words.  
        I heard both Anthea and the nurse step away from the room.  
        Greg's fingers slid gently across my skin.  His touch was too tender and careful.  There was a faint tremor in his hand and he rocked slightly side to side in the chair, unable to rest his weight comfortably.  I could see the burns on his hands and a few minor cuts on his face.  
        "You're going to be fine," he said, trying to comfort me again before taking a laboured breath.
        "You're injured."  My voice was raspy, but strong now.  
        "Just a few cuts and scrapes.  They're not even going to admit me for a stay.  You, though.  You'll be here a bit so they can get that hip back to where it belongs."  His voice weakened and slowed with each word.  
        "The hell you're not bloody being admitted," I barked, grabbing the call button beside me.  
        The nurse rushed back into the room.  "Are you in pain, Mr. Holmes?"
        My eyes opened wider this time.  "I'll be fine, as you said.  Inspector Lestrade has a collapsed lung and significant internal bleeding.  Why has he not been placed in a bed?"
        "I what?"  Greg's voice filled with panic and shock.  "Myc, I'm alright."
        My eyes moved from the nurse to Greg.  "Do you want to believe a triage nurse or me?" I asked dryly.  I refocused my attention to the nurse again.  "Look at him. His chest is expanding unevenly.  Can't you see the right side is sluggish - reluctant?  He cannot speak at normal volume.  He's wheezing. His colouring is sallow and his eyes are graying. He needs a blood transfusion."
        She looked at me, seemingly shocked at the evidence I was offering. 
        "Now!" I yelled.  
        The nurse jumped a bit as my voice echoed through the room and she immediately pulled a wheelchair from the corridor.  "Let's get you checked over again, Inspector."  
        Greg stared at me blankly. 
        "I will be fine.  I promise.  Get in the chair.  I'll be along."  I spoke as if the promise of my presence was what he wanted. I'd forgotten for those few moments how all of this had happened - how desperately in conflict we actually were.
        He moved to the wheelchair without a word and let the nurse wheel him off. 
        "Anthea."  I called for her attention.  
        She quickly appeared at my side.
        "You missed that?  You didn't see he was fading?" She had betrayed me, but why would she allow Greg's well-being to be neglected.
        Her voice was soft and hesitant.  "Honestly, I wasn't paying that much attention."  She took my hand in hers, signaling to me without words that her concern and focus were reserved for me.  There were a few grass stains on her dress and her knees carried the remnants of earth, but she was clearly unscathed by the blast.  That meant Sherlock was also safe. 
        I squeezed her hand gently. "Why?"  My question had nothing to do with her last statement and she knew it.  
        "You two have been in constant conflict and you're both so stubborn.  I knew neither of you would easily concede."  She smiled at me, sheepishly.  
        "Explain to me, my dear, how he survived." 
        "Sentiment."  She spoke coolly.  
        "I'm sorry?"  
        "Eurus was right.  You, just like your brother, are always hindered by sentiment."
        "I'm hindered by nothing of the sort."  I released her small hand.  
        "The contraption he was bound to wasn't set to ignite the fuel.  It was set to release him.  All he had to do was move his arms.  He escaped the cellar before you ever went near the hose. The hose is what caused the explosion.  The spigot was connected to the ignitor.  You failed to see both.  You failed to see both because you were emotionally involved.  You failed to see both because your love for that man is more powerful than your hard drive."  She formed quotations with her fingers as she spoke the last two words. 
        "So, it was all rigged so that he'd only be injured if I tried to save him?"
        "No.  It was rigged to prove a point."
        I sighed with annoyance.  "Go on."
        "It was rigged to test you - to prove that he knows you, no matter how hard you try to keep secrets.  He knew that if he fought you and told you to leave, you would.  You'd rather walk away and think than kowtow to him or, God forbid, Eurus.  He knew you'd walk away and then come back to save him.  He expected to have time to get out of the house completely before you ever touched the hose."  She paused.  "And he would have if your brother hadn't thrown your timing out of whack by taunting you."  
        I refused to hear any more in that moment.  "Once his lung has been seen to he'll need to be examined by an optician as well.  
        "I'll see to it," she replied softly.  She looked up as if she was expecting me to elucidate.
        "Convergence insufficiency.  He must have been knocked around enough by the explosion to induce a bit of whiplash.  He's going to need corrective lenses."  
        She shook her head and rolled her eyes.  "I'll see to it.  What else?"
        "Find out when they're going to fix this damn hip.  If it's going to be too long, I want this gurney wheeled to his room."
        "Alright."  She started to walk away.  "Mycroft," she began, without turning to face me, "I'm sorry."
        "You meant well."  That's all I was going to give her for the time being.  Greg was fairly seriously injured after all.  Though, that did seem to rest a bit more on Sherlock's shoulders.

 

  
***
 

        "I'm sorry, sir. That's just not something we're able to do.  It's completely against every policy we have."  Anthea had heeded my request and I was now listening to the incompetent ramblings of the Dean of Medicine.  A short, mousy looking thing, she spoke insistently at my bedside. "Your daughter explained your request sir, but we just can't allow you to see your friend while you're an inpatient."
        My daughter?  Did she really say that?  That lit a fire slightly stronger than the one already stoking.  "She's not my daughter.  She is my P.A.  Did you look at the name on my records?"
        She looked down at the folder in her hand and her eyes suddenly fogged with panic.  "Mr. Holmes!  I'm so sorry.  Let me make arrangements for you immediately.  What did you say the other patient's name was?  I'm so sorry."
        "Detective Inspector Gregory Lestrade.  He's in room 1895."  
        The woman who oversaw St. Bartholomew's on the daily fluttered around like a moth being chased by a bat as Anthea watched from the corner of the room with a smirk on her face.  In less than two minutes a young orderly was wheeling me toward the elevator to Greg's room.   

 

***
 

        As the stretcher approached the door to room 1895, I cleared my throat forcefully to make my presence known to Greg.  His eyes were closed.  The bag of blood was already half infused and the chest tube remained, but it appeared his lung had been inflated.  
        He looked up at me, making eye contact, but giving zero clues as to his emotions.  Well, zero clues detectable to any common person.  His shoulders lowered and his toes, first flexed beneath his blanket, released. 
        The orderly left me near his bed so that my head was near his feet.  As the young man left the room, Anthea stepped in behind him, moved me so that I was at an angle, allowing our hands to be in reach of one another and our faces no farther than they might be while sitting across a café table. "I'll leave you two alone," she said softly, escaping the room in mere seconds.  
        "Thank you," Greg managed after a few seconds of silence.
        "For?"
        "Saving my life, apparently," he expounded, motioning with his hand toward the tube exiting his right side near the rib cage.  
        "It's what I do," I replied, tapping my fingers on the waterproof mattress just beside my displaced titanium hip.  Why?  Why did I say that?  It was so arrogant and self-congratulatory.  That certainly wasn't going to mend any fences.  
        I looked up to see Greg shaking his head in disbelief, yet smiling simultaneously.  "You're never not you, are you?"
        I couldn't find a way to reply without further proving his point.
        "You took that bullet for me a few years ago, Mycroft, and I have no doubt you'd do the same thing a dozen times over, but you find it impossible to be honest with me."  He looked down, picking at his fingernails as he spoke.  
        "I don't find it impossible.  I made a poor decision."  My words were curt and sharp.  
        "Oh," he began, drawing out the vowel for what seemed like a full twenty seconds. "So, you can, in fact, admit that you're not perfect." 
        "Greg, I ..."
        "No. Nope."  He interrupted me almost immediately.  "I'm going to talk and you're going to listen.  You can't stand up or walk away.  There's no one here to wheel you away on command.  For once, I have some semblance of higher ground.  You're going to listen to me."
        I raised my brow and widened my eyes at him, as if to say "Is that so?" but knew he was right.  I really had no recourse at the moment.  
        "You're an idiot."  
        I immediately spoke up.  "An idiot has an intelligence quotient of no more than 25, Greg, my IQ is..."
        "One ninety-fucking-six.  Yes.  I know," he groaned.  "Didn't I say you were going to listen?"
        I motioned with my hand for him to continue.
        "You're an idiot."  He paused to test me - making sure I remained silent.  "There's also something called EQ.  Did you know that?  It has to do with social-emotional intelligence.  I've been trained on it.  Someone decided it's valuable for interrogations.  I don't know 'bout that, but it sure is valuable when dealing with the Holmes family."
        It took every ounce of control I could muster not to roll my eyes.
        He continued.  "I'm going to let you talk now, but I don't want you to say anything outside of what I ask you to. Why did you hide that you knew about my past?"
        I thought carefully before I spoke.  No phrasing, no choice of words was going to make the answer sound any more rational.  "Initially?  I hid it because I didn't want you to feel unsafe around me.  In the beginning, I didn't want you to fully realise that I knew everything about you, and always would, whether you liked it or not.  I didn't want you to feel like you had no privacy, no space of your own.  I wanted it to feel like we were simply getting to know one another as any normal people would.  I wanted you to feel in-control.  I wanted you to feel safe with me, Greg."
        "You don't think that after just a few months I understood the full influence of your power in this world?  Bollocks."  
        He wasn't going to let me get through this easily.  I suppose I couldn't blame him, though.  "After a while, I'd nearly forgotten about it.  We were happy together and it never crossed my mind.  It was irrelevant.  I had truly put it out of my mind until the owner of that club called you by name that night.  As soon as your name crossed his lips, it came flooding back.  But, Greg, I promise you, I hadn't thought about it in years."
        "I left you there.  That night.  At the club.  I left you there.  I left with Sally.  You got home after I did.  I assume you had the entire car ride, alone with your driver, to think about it.  You thought about it and made a deliberate decision to continue lying to me.  You could have just told me that night that you knew everything."  His heart rate was climbing and a bit erratic, setting off the alarm on the monitor. 
        "Greg, calm down," I said gently, reaching for his hand.
        He withdrew his hand from mine immediately.  "Why did you lie to me that night?  Why did you decide to put on a play, Mycroft?  You spent weeks - or has it been more than a month now?  You spent a month pretending to be hurt.  You acted your way through this as if you were traumatised and shocked."
        "I'm sorry!"  I blurted it out.  The words never tasted good in my mouth, but they were necessary.
        He looked at me, cocking his neck slightly to indicate his surprise at my words.
        "I'm sorry," I repeated, calmly this time.  "When I arrived home that night you were already intoxicated.  You were smoking and completely disheveled.  You were clearly upset and off-balance.  I know.  I could have simply told you the truth and comforted you.  I should have let you know that I knew and that it didn't matter to me."
        "Why the hell didn't you?"  The alarm went off again 
        "I was concerned that you'd be upset with me."  I said it as quickly as I could.  It sounded just as asinine as I thought it would.   
        "Upset with you?  For what?"
        "For having hidden my knowledge from day one."  I couldn't look him in the eye.
        He raised his voice as much as he could, wincing slightly and holding on to his side.  "You're an idiot.  You genuinely thought there was a chance that I'd be more upset with you for hiding what you knew about me than I would be after finding out all this was an act?" 
        I mumbled, "you weren't supposed to find out it was an act."
        "Ah.  Yes.  Because you really do think I'm an idiot."  He ran his fingers through his hair, needing somewhere to move through his frustration.
        "I don't think that.  I have never thought that."  I paused, unsure what to say next.  "I'm not proud of it and I am sorry.  If you only understood how sorry...."   I stopped again.  I had to be honest.  "Perhaps," I said slowly, "I romanticised things a bit."
        A moment of silence passed.  "Don't you dare stop there," he said, losing his breath.
        "I was worried you would be upset that I had hidden my knowledge for so long.  When I walked in the door and found you already distraught, drinking out of the bottle, I saw... an opportunity.  If I played the victim a bit too, you'd try to woo me back into your good graces once you were sober. Then, we could both be the hero on some level, and..."
        He interrupted, "...and have some smashing make-up sex and live happily ever after?  Oh, Mycroft.  Such an idiot."  He paused.  "You got what you wanted, though.  I did try to woo you.  You fought me every step of the way.  How long were you going to let it go on?"
        "I don't know, Greg.  Every minute that ticked by it became more difficult to tell you the truth.  Conversely, the more you did try to win me back the more I thought about your past.  It did start to bother me."
        "Oh, did it?"  His fists were clenched at his sides. "Then where exactly do you stand now, Mr. Holmes?  Am I just some disgusting dim-witted copper with a dodgy past?"
        I reached for his hand again.  He didn't pull away this time.  "Obviously not."
        I'm not sure how many minutes we sat in silence before he spoke.  Eventually he adjusted his hand, lacing our fingers together.  "If I didn't love you so much, I would absolutely fucking despise you."