This chapter comes with apologies for the long wait! I wanted to get it right and give the story the ending that it deserves.

It does contain references to abuse, so if that's likely to upset you then please don't read. Happy to provide an abridged version if anybody wants to PM me for one.

And with that warning done, I hope that you all enjoy it. And Merry Christmas! Only four months late...

Sherlock woke from uneasy dreams with a throat that felt as if it was on fire, a pounding headache, and a raging thirst.

But as he lay there, unwilling to open his eyes, he contemplated how comfortable the bed he was lying on was and how strangely smooth hessian sacks could feel against your skin. He wriggled his toes and realised to his disconcertion that they came into contact not with slightly sweaty boots as he had expected, but with clean sheets. Gone too was the smell of old sack, leaf mold and damp wood, replaced with clean air and just a hint of cleaning fluid. He opened his eyes to check his surroundings only to rapidly screw them shut again against the bright lights. Wherever he was, it certainly wasn't in the gardener's shed in Richmond Park that he had fallen asleep in.

'I know that you're awake,' came a voice from beside the bed. 'There's no point in pretending to be asleep.'

Sherlock groaned and pulled the pillow over his head.

'Small tip for you, little brother -' Mycroft's voice. Definitely Mycroft. 'If you don't want to be found, don't leave a broken padlock lying on the ground outside the shed you're hiding in, and don't carry a book with you that has both your name and a bookplate from the family library in it.'

An edge of disapproval crept into his voice as he added, 'And while I'm impressed by your choice of reading matter, a nineteenth-century edition of Herodotus in the original Greek is hardly the book to be carting halfway across the country in a rucksack.'

Sherlock lay silent and still. If he had known his brother less well he might have hoped he would take the hint and go away. This being Mycroft, he knew that he would stay, and found himself oddly comforted by the realisation.

Rather than the frustration that he might have predicted at having been found, what he felt was an overwhelming sense of relief at being warm, and safe, and in a comfortable bed, and in knowing that he no longer had to be responsible for himself. He had proved that he could survive in the adult world, but there was something to be said for allowing yourself to be looked after, for falling back into the safety of childhood.

He pulled the pillow off his head and looked at his brother. Mycroft looked tired and far older than his twenty-five years. His shirt was slightly crumpled as if he had retrieved it from the laundry bin and thrown it on in a hurry, his customary tie was missing and he was wearing a pair of old corduroy trousers usually reserved for weekends at home at Cantley Hall. More telling, he obviously hasn't shaved for several days, and he was wearing the horn-rimmed glasses that he hated wearing in public, taking his poor eye-sight as a sign of weakness. There were deep purple shadows under his eyes which the glasses only highlighted. He looked like a man who had been working without sleep for the best part of a week, which in all probability, Sherlock realised, he had. Although this time his sleep-deprivation was not due to ensuring national security, but rather to finding his errant little brother and returning him home safely.

He felt an unsettling stab of compassion for his brother, followed by a strange urge to apologise for what he had put him through. Both were unfamiliar and uncomfortable sensations. But apologising to Mycroft just wasn't what he did, no matter how tired or ill he was, and so he remained silent, not trusting himself to speak.

'You could have just phoned me,' Mycroft said, with that poor attempt at concealing frustration that Sherlock knew so well.

This at least had the positive effect of removing any irrational desire Sherlock had to apologise. He elected instead for silently glaring at his brother.

'Don't glare at me, Sherlock, I'm being serious.'

'I screwed up,' Sherlock spat the words out, his voice sounding oddly scratchy even to him. His throat burned and the effort of talking provoked a spasm of coughing that made his chest feel as if it was on fire. He curled into a ball and waited for the spasm to pass.

When he eventually opened his eyes again, a plastic straw was hovering next to his mouth as if summoned. He drank the water that it offered gratefully before realising that the hand that held the cup was Mycroft's.

'Thank you,' he muttered, brushing at an irritation in his nose where his fingers came into contact with a plastic oxygen tube secured to his face. There was a cannula in his arm connected to a bag of clear fluid.

'Where am I?' he asked reluctantly.

Mycroft sighed. 'Hospital. Where else?'

'I've worked that out, Mycroft. Which hospital?'

'Kingston. In the private wing after a great deal of debate and the need for some serious escalation up the chain of command. They wanted you under the paediatricians, as you are still officially a child but the paediatricians do not take private patients. The facts that you had been sleeping rough on the streets of London, had more drugs in your system that your average drug-dealer and needed to be checked for infestation helped to sway them to the benefits of a private room under the care of the adult physicians. Which, it could be argued, is more than you deserve. The thought of holding vigil by your bedside on a general ward full of incontinent old men was, however, more than I could bear. You could argue that the private room was as much for my own comfort as yours.'

Sherlock lay still, assimilating the information he had been offered. He ached all over and he felt so weak that even turning over to avoid Mycroft's gaze seemed like too much of an effort. His head throbbed, his throat burned, he felt exhausted, but at the bottom of all of that, what he pushed the physical sensations aside was a sense of deep and immense calm. And a silence that he had not experienced for weeks.

'The voices - they've gone,' he said aloud, more to himself that to Mycroft.

'Wonderful what a little haloperidol will do isn't it?' Mycroft said dryly. 'When they picked you up they thought that you were delirious but I recognised the theme behind your ramblings. James Harrison has been informed and has been advising your clinical team by telephone,' he said, naming the psychiatrist who had looked after Sherlock the previous year during his stay in Elmhurst psychiatric hospital.

Sherlock closed his eyes again. Medication, psychiatrists, he had been here before. He didn't want to go there again. Even the thought of Elmhurst brought a rush of fear and emotion that he had spent months trying to suppress.

After his mother's death, he had spiraled into an episode of psychotic depression that had landed him in a psychiatric unit for several months. It wasn't something that he liked to dwell on, in fact, he tried very hard not to think about it at all. Thoughts of Elmhurst came with flashes of memory, of days spent curled up in bed convinced that he was drowning in thick mud or being eaten alive by demons, of voices within his head that so loud that he had tried to rip out fistfuls of his hair in the hope that he could pull them out of his head in the process. He has been told that many patients experienced depression as an absolute emptiness; his had been a howling despair that had transmuted to an almost physical pain. Dark, consuming and apparently endless.

The treatment that they had subjected him to in Elmhurst had been almost worse than the illness itself; they had given him electric shock treatment - high voltages of electricity applied directly to his brain designed to jolt out the misery and the voices and as it turned out large chunks of his memory. He would wake after treatment sessions disorientated and panicking with no recollection of where he was, and spend the next forty-eight hours gradually piecing together the information that he was given with a throbbing head and aching joints. Then just when he was beginning to feel as if he had regained some sort of hold on reality, he would be taken back to that room, subjected to more shocks and the whole cycle would start all over again.

He had begged them to stop, but he was deemed incapable of making his own decisions, and besides, they had his father's blessing and his signature on their piece of paper and it seemed that was all that was required. And when it has finally stopped, when he finally began to believe that he had some chance of getting well, of getting home, he had started to remember. And what he had remembered - about his father, about what had been done to him, had led to his father requesting more shocks and trying to keep him in Elmhurst permanently. For who would believe the word of a psychotic teenager over a peer of the realm?

And the answer was sitting next to him. Mycroft had believed him. Mycroft, notified by a small number of staff at the institution who has risked their jobs and their careers to protect him, had got Sherlock out. He had stood up to his father and appealed Sherlock's Mental Health Act section with a judge, had turned up at Elmhurst in the middle of the night, brandishing the paperwork, loaded Sherlock who was so drugged by this point that he could hardly walk into his car and had taken him home.

Sherlock's own abuse at the hands of his father had turned out to be only a small part of a wider circle of abuse, the tendrils of which had reached into the highest tiers of society. And his father had been the spider at the centre of the web, pulling the strings, orchestrating the deals. Mycroft has told him only what he wanted to know, and what he had wanted to know was very little. That his father had been prepared to have him branded as insane and locked up permanently in order to protect himself was one thing, Sherlock had learned to accept that this was just the way that his fathers twisted head worked. His father would always and forever be at the centre of his own universe and everyone else he came across were just chess pieces, to be pushed across the board or sacrificed for his own greater purposes. What bothered him more, what he still could not bear to contemplate, were the other boys who had been involved. He suspected there were many, but he didn't ask and Mycroft, respecting his wishes and watching him with a wary eye whenever the subject was raised, didn't tell him.

His father had suffered a massive stroke shortly before his release from Elmhurst. Mycroft always told him that he would have got him out anyway, but Sherlock didn't have his confidence. He was aware that it was a combination of luck and the loyalty of the few that enabled him to escape. He wasn't going to risk his luck a second time. He was never going back to that place, or anywhere like it.

It had taken him months to return to some semblance of a normal life. He was still meant to be taking medication, but his medication had been at home at Cantley Hall, and while benzodiazepines had proved easy to get hold of on the streets, antipsychotics and antidepressants were another question. Not that he had tried. Not that he had even thought to ask. He had been glad to be free of them, to have his head clear of the fug, and on the streets, he had needed to have his wits about him. Not that he had been taking them regularly in the weeks before the interviews anyway, trying to reduce it on his own - half a tablet, a quarter of a tablet. His escape to London had only speeded up a process that he had been halfway to completing anyway.

His psychiatrist, James Harrison, would be frustrated with him, he knew, but he wouldn't show his frustration. He would hide it behind measured silences and careful reflective questioning until Sherlock pushed him to admit that he thought that he had screwed up. And he didn't need that and didn't want that. He just wanted everyone to go away and leave him alone. But not with the voices, he was glad that those at least had gone.

He glanced over at Mycroft who was watching his expression and reading all of his inner dialogue in his face, no doubt. He really did need to get better at hiding what he felt. It was a skill that his brother had mastered well and he envied it.

Mycroft raised an eyebrow at him as if to ask if he was finished.

'What's wrong with me?' Sherlock asked, trying to pull his mind back to the present.

'Hypothermia, pneumonia and an accidental overdose of opiates and benzodiazepines,' Mycroft told him in clipped tones. 'I ensured that the word accidental featured prominently on your notes. I assured them that had you wished to end your life you would have done it more conclusively.

'Tell me that I'm right, Sherlock.' The final five words were almost spat out in a mixture of anger and - Sherlock had to check Mycroft's expression to make sure - emotion?

'Sherlock?' there was a warning edge to Mycroft's voice, 'Tell me what were you trying to achieve - please.'

Please? Mycroft never said please. Sherlock looked at his brother and saw the concern etched on his face, and realised that the monster that he had been running away from did not exist. Mycroft, his brother Mycroft, had got him out of Elmhurst despite his father's best efforts to keep him there. He had brought him home to Cantley Hall, he had tried his best to support Sherlock through his recovery, no matter how hard Sherlock had tried to push him away, he had hired him tutors and found him a private college to prepare him for his Cambridge interviews. And more, he had tried to parent Sherlock - clumsily, inexpertly, often in a manner that was more controlling than supportive, but he had done it none the less.

'I'm sorry,' he whispered, and hid his face in the pillow, hoping that Mycroft wouldn't notice that his cheeks were wet, blaming the tears on exhaustion, knowing how his brother hated emotion.

'You didn't answer my question,' Mycroft told him, after several minutes of silence, and the flat imperiousness of this jerked Sherlock back through regret to irritation, a far more comfortable emotion.

'I wasn't trying to kill myself,' he told him snappily. 'I just wanted to sleep.' And that was true, wasn't it? He thought that it was true, although maybe when it came to it, he had just been too tired to care.

'And you nearly achieved that - permanently.'

'If you're just here to lecture me, Mycroft, why don't you just piss off!' The last words were almost shouted and brought on another fit of coughing that had him gasping for breath and made the monitor he was attached to beep alarmingly. He was aware of Mycroft going to the door and returning with a nurse, who sat him up with the aid of the electric bed, and replaced his nasal oxygen with a facial mask, blasting him with oxygen that he sucked on gratefully.

Mycroft remained silent hovering by the door to the room as if he was reluctant to stay but unwilling to leave, while the nurse did whatever it was that nurses do, documented everything on his chart and after a murmured conversation with Mycroft, left the room.

'The nurse informs me that I should try not to upset you,' Mycroft said calmly, reclaiming his seat by the bed. 'Fortunately, this is the private wing and I am footing the bill. I am also your legal guardian, although I suspect that the former is the primary reason that I have not yet been asked to leave, and why I am sufficiently convinced of her discretion to be able to show you this.'

He reached into the pocket of his tweed jacket and pulled out a small plastic bag of green plant fibres which he tossed with an air of contempt onto the bed, inches away from Sherlock's nose.

'When I told you to attempt to improved your social skills by integrating with the other students, I didn't mean that you should smoke marijuana behind the bike sheds with them,' he said. 'I thought you were marginally more intelligent than that. James Harrison assures me that this is almost certainly the cause of your auditory hallucinations, by the way, drug induced psychosis. Common - and reversible, with discontinued use.'

Sherlock closed his eyes in relief. He wasn't going mad. It wasn't going to come back. If he stopped smoking the weed, the voices would go away.

'Tell me that you're going to stop.'

Sherlock nodded, silently, miserably, not trusting himself to speak.

'You should have told me, Sherlock,' Mycroft said, and there was an edge of sadness to his voice that Sherlock couldn't miss.

'You were busy,' he mumbled. 'I was just trying to fit in. Wasn't that what you told me to do? To fit in?'

'And I liked it,' was what he couldn't say, 'I liked the way it made me feel, it made me feel normal, it made me feel as if I belonged.'

'So - opiates, benzodiazepines, marijuana, anything else I should know about?'

Sherlock shook his head silently.

'Why did you stop taking your medication?' Mycroft asked.

'I just wanted to be normal.'

'Why on earth would you want that?'

'Do you never just want to be like everyone else?

'To be a goldfish, swimming round and round without any concept of how limited their tank is? No. And neither should you. We are neither of us goldfish, Sherlock and never will be, irrespective of how many psychoactive substances you ingest.'

Sherlock closed his eyes and lay still, willing sleep to come. He had had enough of being lectured for one day. He just wanted to sleep and recover and then get out of this place; back to Cantley Hall, to his room and his books and his own personal lab and all that he had left behind.

'Tell me what happened?' Mycroft said.

'You know what happened. I'm sure that you have reports in triplicate.'

'Perhaps I should rephrase that. I am fully aware of what happened in terms of timeline of events. What I want to know is why it happened.'

'So that you can tell me off again?'

Mycroft sighed. 'Sherlock, believe it or not, I do have your best interests at heart. Now just tell me, or I swear to God, I will set the local psychiatrists on you. And I can guarantee that they will be less understanding than Dr Harrison.

Sherlock scowled, considered, and realising that Mycroft had never once failed to carry through any of his threats, began.

'The interview went well to start with. They asked me about chemistry, we discussed a couple of experiments, I did a couple of equations for them. There were three interviewers - a tall scruffy man who sat in the corner and said little; I didn't catch his name. Then there was Professor Beyton, the organic chemistry professor who seemed sensible enough and Professor Johns who asked more challenging questions and kept looking at me strangely.

'All of this happened because he looked at you strangely?' Mycroft cut in with an edge of exasperation to his voice.

'No! Of course not, let me finish. Did you know that Professor Johns was an associate of our father?'

Mycroft looked at his brother sharply, 'I wasn't aware of that, no. If I had been, I would have intervened. I don't recall his name from any of the investigations.'

Investigations. Mycroft's shorthand for the extensive and painful exploration of the affairs of Viscount Richard Holmes which were still ongoing and had turned up enough dirt to keep the red-topped tabloids in business for months. Not that they would ever gained access to the vast majority. With Mycroft in charge, press access was strictly limited. There were plenty of court orders in place to ensure that.

Sherlock swallowed hard, pushing back the physical sensation of nausea that always accompanied any reminder of what had happened to him at the hands of his father. With the nausea came an illogical desire to scream as loudly as he could. Dr Harrison told him that this was an understandable visceral reaction to what had happened to him, to the abuse that he had suffered. The desire to scream was because he hadn't been able to at the time, or when he had, his screams had gone unheard and unheeded. The nausea - well that was another thing that Sherlock didn't want to dwell on for longer than he has to. He pushed it aside and took several deep breaths as he had been taught. Deep breath in, hold for the count of two, breathe out for the count of seven and repeat. He could almost feel Mycroft's concerned gaze on him as he took another breath and another. After the sixth, he was ready to continue.

'He asked me at the end of the interview if I was the son of Viscount Richard Holmes,' he said, struggling to keep his voice steady, not daring to look at Mycroft. 'When I said yes, he informed me with a patronising little smile what a wonderful man my father had been, and told his colleagues as an aside that he had been the very man to procure anything that you might require, no matter how obscure.

'And then he laughed. He laughed, Mycroft, and looked at me as if he was wondering if I had been -'

'Procured?' Mycroft finished with distaste. And the tension in his jaw betrayed him, his usual attempt at keeping the emotion out of his face defeated. He turned his face aside, as if aware of what he was doing, and Sherlock thought that he heard him swearing softly under his breath.

When he turned back, several minutes later, his face had regained its normal mask of calm.

'No, I wasn't informed of that part of the conversation,' Mycroft told him. 'Neither Dr Johns or Dr Beyton thought to mention it. I suspect as a result of a collusion between them. An omission that I assure you will be followed up. I was simply informed that you had accused him of being a pervert, thrown several books and a model of the human brain at his head and jumped out of the window. Fortunate that the interview was being held on the ground floor.'

'I had to get out of there,' Sherlock said.

'I appreciate that, and I will ensure that the man is dealt with appropriately, but why run away, Sherlock? There was a car waiting for you outside the college. Instead, you elected to cut round the back the college, climb over a wall and take a train to London? A tad dramatic don't you think?'

'What would you have had me do, Mycroft? Shake their hands and thank them for the insults?'

He was shouting now but found that he didn't care. He could have thumped his brother but fortunately didn't have the strength.

Mycroft gave him the look. The one that told him to calm down. The one that would lead to patronising suggestions to control his breathing and start behaving like a rational human being and not a basket case. The one that suggested that he was over-reacting.

He gritted his teeth, closed his eyes and calmed himself down. No point in giving Mycroft ammunition for any more digs about psychiatrists or sedation.

'You knew where I'd gone?' he asked when he finally trusted himself to speak.

'Of course, I knew where you'd gone. I tracked you down after a couple of days, and made efforts to ensure your safety.'

Sherlock considered this for a moment, his mind tracking swiftly through the people he had interacted with. It didn't take him long to deduce the identity of Mycroft's mole.

'Tom - Tom was a plant?' He allowed himself to feel a little smug at having his suspicions confirmed. Not just paranoia after all.

Was he mistaken or was there an edge of pride in Mycroft's voice in Sherlock working it out. A sign that at last, he had started to pay attention to his repeated instructions to observe.

'Yes, well done,' Sherlock tried hard not to feel patronised. 'One of our newer recruits,' Mycroft continued. 'What did you make of him?'

Sherlock snorted. 'Beginners errors,' he said airily, not wanting to betray exactly how long it had taken him to work it out. 'Too many things that didn't add up. Wrong hair products for a start. Why didn't you pull me in sooner?'

'It took a while to confirm you were who we thought you were,' Mycroft told him. 'Can't go scooping random young vagrants up off the streets without causing a stir. Besides, I was intrigued to see how good your survival skills were.'

Sherlock stares at his brother in fury. 'Did I pass your test?' he asked.

Mycroft sighed. 'You ended up with a drug habit and pneumonia and nearly dying of hypothermia in a garden shed, Sherlock. I think that we can write that one off as a serious error of judgment - for both of us.'

Sherlock glared at Mycroft, who glared back before his expression softened, and he dropped his eyes to his clasped hands, looking distinctly uncomfortable. 'I owe you an apology, Sherlock.'

Now here was a first. 'For what?' Sherlock asked.

'For not being someone you felt you could come to when it all went wrong, and for allowing you to stay out on the streets for so long. For not finding you and bringing you home sooner. For not keeping you safe.'

Sherlock looked at his brother in confusion. 'Do you think that's your job? To keep me safe?'

'Always,' came the simple reply. 'Although my job may have been made remarkably easier by something which arrived in the post while you were gone. He reached into his pocket and withdrew an envelope and threw it into the bed where it landed centimetres from Sherlock's nose.

'What's this?' He asked suspiciously.

'Open it and see.'

He reached out a hand and picked up the envelope. It was suspiciously thick and bore the postmark of Gonville and Caius college, Cambridge.

'But I didn't apply there.'

'No, you didn't.

'So why are they writing to me?'

'Open it and see.'

'Cautiously he tore open the envelopes to be greeted by a thick sheaf of paperwork, a leaflet entitled 'Guide for New Students' and a letter which began, 'Dear Mr Holmes, I am delighted...'

He looked up at Mycroft in shock. 'Did you do this?' he asked. 'Because I told you not to pull strings, Mycroft. I told you that I wanted to get in on my own or not at all.'

''Absolutely nothing to do with me, I assure you,' Mycroft told him. 'Dr Hughes, who has a fellowship at Caius, was sitting in on your interview after one of the King's tutors called in sick at the last moment. I suspect that he was the scruffy chap you described as staying silent in the corner. Fortunately for you, he cannot abide Professor Johns and has been aware for some time of allegations of misconduct by him towards young men during tutorials which had been brushed under the carpet by the establishment. He both agreed with your character analysis and was impressed by your dramatic escape. It will go down in college history, apparently, together with the candidate who set fire to the tutor's newspaper in response to the challenge 'Surprise me.'

'What he was impressed with more, however, was your intellectual ability and the fact that you solved the test equations in less than half the time it took any other candidate.

'He was made aware of your special circumstances during the investigation into your disappearance, but fortunately for you, it doesn't seem to have put him off. The interviews for Caius were scheduled for the following week. He was, therefore, able to offer you a place prior to any other offers being made and seems keen for you to take it up.'

'What did you tell him?' Sherlock asked, turning the letter over and over in his hands, trying to convince himself that it was real.

'I told them you were considering your position.'

Sherlock smiled at this despite himself. Considering his position. Was that what he had been doing all those days and nights on the streets? Not nearly freezing to death, not developing pneumonia, not numbing the pain with as many drugs as he could get his hands on. He had been considering his position, of course, he had.

He ran his finger over the words on the letter 'I am delighted to be able to offer you...'

All he had ever wanted. All he has ever dreamed of. A place at Cambridge, the opportunity to study under some of the most brilliant scientific minds in the country, in the world. And more, an indication that what he was, was okay - no that it was better than okay. That they saw in him something that they wanted, something that mattered, something worthwhile.

He heard the faint sound of carols coming from outside his room. 'What day is it?' he asked Mycroft.

'Christmas Day,' his brother answered. 'Merry Christmas, Sherlock.'

'Merry Christmas, Mycroft,' he replied, suddenly exhausted.

And so he fell asleep to the distant sound of carols, still clutching the letter that secured his future, and for once in his life feeling that maybe, just maybe, Sherlock Holmes was not such a bad person to be.

Authors notes:

This story comes with huge thanks to O'Donnell for all of her advice and suggestions. This is a far better chapter than it started out as, thanks to your input!

If you would like to know more about Viscount Richard Holmes and his history of 'procurement' have a look at The Box which goes into Sherlock's whole backstory, including his stay at Elmhurst and the events that happened there. The story is continued in the 'Madness and Memory' series.

Gonville and Caius (pronounced 'Keys') is the main college for studying medicine at Cambridge. And who knows, maybe that was where Sherlock developed his fascination for pathology. I bet he snuck into a view anatomy lectures and post-mortems in his time.

The story of the candidate who set fire to the tutor's newspaper at an Oxbridge interview is almost certainly an urban myth that was widely circulating at the time that I was applying many moons ago. As was the story of the candidate who threw a brick through the window without opening it first. As far as I know neither of them got in! The worst think that I was asked at interview was how much you should charge for a human heart in a discussion about selling kidneys but consider that I got off lightly in the circumstances...

And the thick envelope meaning acceptance and thin envelope meaning rejection still stands for exams, school entrances, and many more things. So now you know.

Thank you, as ever, for reading and reviewing. It means a lot.