John had plenty of time to look over the article. Nothing to do in a brand new empty flat but read your dead mate's life story. He wanted to say he wished he had heard them from Sherlock, but that wasn't what their friendship had been about. They had not dwelled in the past. John had not waxed poetic about his life before Afghanistan, and he hadn't expected Sherlock to spill his stories either. They had had enough to deal with in the present.

But there were a few things that probably should have born mentioning. For example, John has always just assumed that Mycroft was his only sibling.

Apparently Mycroft was just the only sibling that still talked to him…

-/-

Sherrinford

Ford was the normal one. The one who was born without what Mummy sometimes referred to as "The Scan". That borderline supernatural ability to look over a thing and know it in an instant. He was a bright child, an intelligent adolescent, and a cultured and composed man, but never a genius.

It would not have been quite so bad if he had not been the oldest. With each passing year, each of the younger siblings gained intellectual ground on him, before passing him in turn. Some, like Hortense, had been kind enough to let it go without mention. Sherlock had had no such qualms.

Ford had last seen Sherlock at Mummy's funeral. The brilliant young man, the pride of the extended family, and he didn't have the decency to show up straight. His fingers had ghosted over the covered track marks beneath his suit, he struggled to stand upright, and Ford couldn't stand to look at him. Couldn't stand to see all that potential wasted.

He had left London. Settled down out in the country, started a small little career in retail. It wasn't challenging, not to someone raised in the Holmes' household, but it was pleasant, and he liked talking to people. He got on with a coworker of his, proposed after a year of dating, and had a quiet little wedding at her family's farm. Mycroft was invited, but was unable to come; Hortense was his fiancée's maid of honor; a year later, they named their first (adopted) child Lenora. With all the madness in the Holmes' blood, he wasn't going to risk it with his own children.

And a small, silent part of him was glad when he didn't have to put up with the Scan.

-/-

Lenora

Mummy played the cello, but Lenora was always drawn to the double bass. She loved to feel the vibrations traveling from the strings, through the wood of the instrument, through her entire body. She would play for hours on end, filling the house with rumbling low notes and calming the chaos in her mind.

Lenora Holmes noticed everything. Everything. She could read her two older brothers' days in the parting of their hair when they came to supper. She could tell which stories the little ones would want before bedtime by the way they drank their milk. She could tell if anyone had set foot in her bedroom, even bumped into the door, because of all of the million little things that would be wrong, and how did everyone else deal with it?

Sherrinford was too stupid to notice all of the madness going on around him, but Mycroft could tell; she could see it in his eyes and the knot on his school tie and the way he polished his shoes before bed every night. Neat and precise and organized, like she wanted everything to be. Like she was achingly aware it wasn't. Her little brother noticed too, but he didn't care. Sherlock saw all of the chaos, saw how much order was needed, but he preferred to let the madness persist. As long as he could figure it out, it didn't matter how much disarray it was in. He played the violin with a reckless abandon; he didn't need the notes to make sense.

Despite all of the rifts and divides it would cause in later years, her death had nothing to do with anyone else; not her passive Daddy or bipolar Mummy, not the older brothers who couldn't save her nor the younger siblings who barely knew her. When she held the syringe in her hand, full of precise amounts of toxins and sedatives, her thoughts were only focused on getting a moment of peace. She had dressed in her favorite outfit, left her note in plain view, made everything about her choice clear.

One little boy was disappointed: there was no mystery in it.

-/-

Hortense

She went by Professor Holmes these days. She had spent long enough getting her job, she felt she was free to brag about it in her title, just a bit. She spent her days trying to pound a bit of logic into the minds of glassy-eyed students, and her nights at her desk, scrawling pages of theorems and calculations, trying to extend the reach of mathematics and logic just a little bit farther, to explain the world just a little bit more. Her notebooks had always been her solace.

After Lenora had gone, she was the last girl, the youngest in a family of active minds and sharp tongues. No one cared what happened to the two littlest Holmes children; Daddy was too busy gushing his feelings into his novellas and Mummy was trying to play double bass parts on the cello. Sherrinford was already half out the door and Mycroft was well on his way to greatness. Sherlock was busy shooting up cocaine in his room. Her drug of choice had been ketamine; at sixteen, she discovered that God was made of numbers.

It was the build-up university that actually got her to clean up her act. A little order was just what she needed; she wanted to work inside a structure for a while. Ford called her on her desire for a fancy degree, and she couldn't pretend otherwise. Sherlock was busy getting kicked out of every school he went to, but she knew how to slip under the radar, how to be polite enough to get past the idiot teachers and get to the real meat of the subjects. She also knew how to specialize; she didn't need to be a master in everything, her head just didn't have that much room. She wasn't Lenora. Sherlock deleted things, while she just chose not to learn them in the first place. She had her numbers and that was all she needed.

Numbers and a clean break. She kept in touch with Ford, but he was an entirely different entity, a breed apart. Every now and then she would walk the streets of London and say hello to the open air; Mycroft was sure to get that. She visited Lenora's grave every year. And after that dreadful business that was all over the papers, she visited his grave as well.

Her students occasionally asked her if she was related to the web detective. She told them to keep their eyes on their papers.

She had learned to specialize.