A/N: Wow, another character piece about Mycroft and his inner world. Did someone say obsessed? Who, me?

For those who wonder where all this is coming from, let me address my POV. (If that bores you, skip this part.) I see the main Sherlock characters in the last episode going through he'll, but each one getting some sort of happy ending- or almost.

John and Sherlock are besties again, solving crimes and raising Rosie. Mrs. Hudson has her boys back. Lestrade has finally gained Sherlock's respect, enough to remember his name (!), and has seen Sherlock become a good man. Molly is a bit more complicated, as we don't know exactly what occurred to her afterwards, but she has obviously found some happiness, and has repaired her friendship with Sherlock. Even Eurus is brought out of her fugue under Sherlock's tender care.

So who's left? Mycroft, with all he's done, and suffered, for the sake of his family, watches all he has tried to maintain crumble, his sister get the better of him, and to top it all off, everyone blames him. Sherlock, John, his parents, and mostly he himself. He gets no acknowledgement, no consolation, and ends up even more alone than before. All he gets is a hint of forgiveness, when Mummy squeezes his hand. Yet it must be small comfort, when Sherlock has suddenly replaced him as the reliable son, and Eurus is getting unconditional love despite what she has done, while he was harshly judged.

Did Mycroft deserve all of that? That depends on your opinion. Has he brought it all unto himself? Again, there are various opinions and viewpoints, all worthy of being expressed and debated. In this piece, I want to take a serious, but somewhat humorous look at all of that, and would love to hear your thoughts. Sorry for the long note.

This story will be about three or four chapters long.

Somewhere, somehow, he had gone wrong. He had messed up, not only his own life, but that of all he should have cared for. So they told him.

Some believed him to lack essential qualities required to be trusted his decisions. "You must be very limited," indeed. He was, if only because he couldn't figure out how his good intentions had come to this.

Others went further. They believed him to have messed up, not because he had gone wrong, but only because he hadn't cared to ensure a different outcome. "Get out of my house, you reptile."

Still others believed him to have actually desired at least part of the outcome, and be deserving of some sort of cosmic justice for his less-than-savory intentions. "What goes around, comes around."

One was more sympathetic, perhaps from the personal experience of unintentionally messing up other lives. Still, he got no trust in his abilities from that quarter, even if he did get credit for intention. "He did the best he could." Yet, he was found lacking in judgement, and even his ability to judge his own strengths. "He's not as strong as he thinks."

All that was left for him was to figure out where he had gone so wrong, and to consider how to fix it. That is, if he even wanted to.

The key to his puzzle could only be hidden in one place, on waters he feared to tread. Because those waters were teaming with goldfish, naturally. He groaned as he realized the awful mixed metaphor he had just created. Nevertheless, he would need to jump into the deep end, and ride the waves. And stop with the awful usage of watery metaphors.

Ah, the goldfish. Whatever he was lacking was obviously something that the goldfish had in abundance. It was a simple deduction, after all. No goldfish he knew had gotten himself into quite such situations as he had, or brought disaster upon their loved ones in the magnitude he had managed to. Which resulted in a simple equation: Goldfish: 1, Mycroft:0.

He ran all the possibilities through his super-efficient brain, sorting, analyzing and deducting. Some possibilities were quickly dismissed. Goldfish might have qualities like stupidity and gullibility in abundance, but Mycroft couldn't accept that he would benefit from more of those.

Sentiment, then. Goldfish embraced sentiment, and valued it highly. Mycroft wasn't foolish enough to deny that he might experience sentiment on occasion, but he was definitely wary of engaging with it. Yet it seemed plausible to him that sentiment was the thing he was lacking, of not in actual ability to feel it, but in readiness to use it.

Mycroft wasn't sure where all this would lead, but he could try.