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"He's got a weak chin, so I can't even show him in the open classes." Anna Saughton swoops unerringly into the mass of yellowish-white bodies wrestling in the pen and comes up with a single, wriggling kitten. "Seven weeks, chocolate point," she says, stepping back over to the sofa and dumping the animal unceremoniously into Mycroft's lap. Startled, he bobbles his cup and saucer before setting them down and clutching at the kitten, which seems about to slither out of his lap and onto the floor. The cat recovers quickly and perches on Mycroft's left knee, staring at him with piercing blue eyes emphasized by contrast to the dark patch that covers its muzzle like a tiny domino mask. Mycroft doesn’t see any particular weakness in the animal’s chin, but he’s never been asked to judge a cat show and with luck, never will be.
"I...really don't know," Mycroft hedges. Anna's husband Daniel, an unfortunately very influential aide to the Home Secretary, smirks from the wing chair opposite.
"Come now, Mr. Holmes, surely you could use a little companion about the place," Mr. Saughton says with false joviality. His distaste for his wife's hobby is evident in everything from his posture to the lack of shed fur on his cuffs, and he obviously relishes the chance to pawn off one of the hated cats on a potential rival. Mycroft stares back at the kitten, which has its ears pricked forward in obvious interest.
He had considered a pet before, as a matter of fact. He treasures his solitude, but has sometimes thought that his house might benefit from having another living creature inhabiting it. He certainly has no time for walks and obedience training, and the thought of visiting a dog park makes him shudder; but cats are meant to be lower maintenance, aren't they? They defecate in the garden of their own accord, or in a pan indoors at worst, and for the most part they look after their own affairs. He imagines the kitten living in his home as a sort of tiny, furry housemate, but one who would not monopolize the bath or insist on small talk. And there is, admittedly, something charming about the idea of having a cat purring on the hearth in the evening.
Mycroft gingerly picks up his tea again without dislodging the cat. "Well, I suppose I could take him on a trial basis," he allows with feigned reluctance. The jeering look on Daniel Saughton's face is not nearly as subtle as he imagines.
"His name is Saughtons Moonwillow Brightfur," Mrs. Saughton says, beaming, and Mycroft narrowly avoids upsetting his cup into his lap for the second time in ten minutes.
---
The kitten is soon moved in. Mycroft has one of his assistants order basic supplies, and instructs his housekeeper on the frequency with which the litter tray should be cleaned. The kitten follows him from room to room like a polite houseguest, observing as Mycroft shows him the tray, the food and water dishes, the garden, and the basket that has been installed on the hearth in his study. The first evening is exactly as Mycroft imagined: after a doubtful sniff at his food and a drink of water, the kitten settles into the basket in a neat curl, tail wrapped around his nose. The only difference from Mycroft's imagining is that the kitten doesn't sleep; each time Mycroft glances up from his paperwork, the kitten is watching him with half-lidded eyes. When Mycroft finally leaves for his bed, the kitten watches him out of the room with a gaze so weighty that Mycroft can almost feel it on his back.
The next day is not so tranquil.
The kitten, re-christened Sherlock- from the Anglo-Saxon bright-lock, because his registered name was horrible but nonetheless his given name- disdains the breakfast Mycroft provides, turning up his tiny nose. A few moments' research reveals that this is common for a cat entering a new home, so Mycroft determines not to worry. He leaves for work and returns late, as usual. Sherlock meets him in the entryway, silently rubbing against his legs. Despite the light fur on his (dark, of course) bespoke trousers, Mycroft is unexpectedly touched by the gesture of affection. He finds Sherlock's breakfast untouched, but nonetheless refills the small ceramic dish with fresh food and sets it back in its place. Sherlock approaches, delicately sniffs at the contents, and looks up at Mycroft. Then he turns back to the dish and overturns it with his paw. Before Mycroft can intercede, Sherlock has also tipped over the water dish, creating a rather disgusting, soupy puddle.
"Bad cat!" Mycroft scolds. He speaks out of shocked reflex more than anything else, but has to fight the urge to blush when the cat looks at him with rather the archest look he’s ever seen. Mycroft sternly tells himself to stop anthropomorphizing; animals just look at things, they don’t express disbelief or scorn or anything else with their facial expressions. Sherlock struts over to the doorway and watches from there as Mycroft mops up the mess, then follows him to the study where he takes his place in the basket.
The next morning, Sherlock takes two bites of his food before abandoning it, but this time he at least does not tip the dishes over. Instead, Mycroft returns home to find Sherlock twining amongst the items displayed on the mantlepiece. He neatly traverses the shelf twice, disturbing nothing, before suddenly darting straight across and knocking each and every item to the floor. He stops at the end of the shelf and stares at Mycroft for several long seconds before leaping down and sauntering away. Mycroft looks at the items on the carpet and restrains the urge to chase the kitten out of the room as being both undignified and unproductive.
Two of his staff have cats, but it would be embarrassing to admit to them that he cannot govern this small animal; admitting of weakness to subordinates also generates familiarity and room for doubt. Instead, Mycroft consults several purported authorities on cats online, and finds the advice that misbehaving kittens are often bored or under-stimulated. He orders the purchase of several cat toys and offers them one at a time. The catnip-stuffed mouse gets a sniff and a trip to the basket in Sherlock’s mouth, which Mycroft initially takes as a sign of success. However, the kitten’s habit of lying in the basket in the evening rubbing his face against the mouse over and over does not stop him from wreaking havoc during the day.
It takes an entire week of Mycroft finding various items in sinks, bathtubs, and toilet bowls around the house before he realizes that Sherlock is placing them there. And he’s only willing to accept that the kitten did so deliberately after the housekeeper swears to him that she was doing the washing-up when she saw Sherlock jump on the counter and bat the hand soap, dish towel, and a salt shaker into the sinkful of water before she chased him away. Mycroft begins keeping the bathroom doors shut.
Mice on strings, stuffed toys that crinkle or chime or squeak when touched, and circular tracks with plastic balls trapped inside are all disregarded. The plastic bobbing cone with the weighted base seems like a better prospect; after presenting it, Mycroft watches Sherlock spend fifteen minutes savagely ripping out all the feathers that sprout from the top and strewing bits of them all over the study. However, he then abandons the toy utterly, and Mycroft is forced to admit another failure.
Finally, he has a cat flap installed in the garden door, so that Sherlock can explore the small, neatly manicured patch of grass and flowers. Mycroft doesn’t have much time to spend in a garden, but he has it maintained because it is part of the house, and he does enjoy being able to look down into the patch of greenery from his bedroom window. It is surrounded on the other three sides by high walls, so Mycroft doesn’t foresee a problem with giving the kitten the run of it. Maybe he’ll enjoy watching the birds, or napping in the sun- wasn’t that supposed to be the height of enjoyment for cats?
For several days, all is blissfully calm. Then, one morning, he gets out of bed and immediately treads on the remains of a mouse. It’s rather disgusting, but Mycroft reasons that he can hardly be angry at a cat for doing what comes naturally. Mice are pests, and if there was a nest of them in the vicinity it was best for all concerned if Sherlock became a mouser. Two days later, it’s the tattered remains of a pigeon on the kitchen floor. Birds and rodents of all descriptions make regular appearances in corpse form, throughout the house. Bizarrely, in addition to the predictable signs of death by feline, they are usually eviscerated, with the innards piled almost neatly next to the splayed corpses. Still, he’s willing to ignore the killings, preferring this gruesome pest control to pointless destruction of his house, until the calls from neighbors start.
Gemma Beasley is his left-hand neighbor, the aging widow of a PM with whom Mycroft has always gotten on perfectly well because they never speak. She calls ceaselessly for three days until she manages to bully her way through his personal assistant and reach Mycroft at work. “That damned Siamese is terrorizing this neighborhood,” she says indignantly.
Terrorizing is a bit much, as characterizations go, but Mycroft’s inquiries soon confirm every complaint Mrs. Beasley pours into his ear, and then some. At home, Sherlock rarely eats his own dinner, but he will climb into neighbors’ open windows to help himself to snacks off the counter and play his game of tipping any nearby items into standing water. He wanders unattended houses and makes himself at home, defecating in flower planters, digging through drawers, and upending any items that take his interest. Mrs. Beasley, for her part, insists that she found a quantity of fine shed fur that proves Sherlock had gotten into her underwear drawer.
He harrasses the chickens kept by the young couple across the street; David Sim calls to tell Mycroft, “We hate to mention it because he never touches a feather, but he scares the hell out of them and then they won’t lay.” Mycroft refuses to believe that such an avid hunter would stalk chickens but refrain from attacking until David shows him the video they shot through their kitchen window: Sherlock makes no attempt to stalk, instead dashing directly at the chickens and retreating to the top of the wall when they dissolve into scurrying, shrieking bedlam. The video shows Sherlock repeating the trick four times before David’s husband goes out to chase him off.
Mycroft’s right-hand neighbor keeps a labrador retriever, and reports that Sherlock has waged a similar campaign of harassment against the dog. She tells Mycroft that Sherlock comes into the garden and paces before their glass door, calling until the dog comes to investigate and then strutting boldly back and forth until the dog is barking at the door with wild fury. “If Bixie is out, the cat meows at her until she starts barking and trying to get at the top of the wall. Then he just sits up there washing himself and pretends not to notice her.” The university student staying with his stepmother two doors down swears that on one occasion, he listened to Sherlock banging and yowling his way through the heating ducts for nearly an hour before making his escape.
That’s another surprise to Mycroft, that the kitten he had found markedly quiet, other than an inquiring mew now and then, is known to be the noisiest in the borough. To hear the neighbors tell it, the street rings with his yowls throughout the day and sometimes at night. His housekeeper confirms it, with evident surprise. “Siamese are always loud,” she tells Mycroft. “My sister keeps them, so honestly I’m so used to it that I didn’t think to mention.”
Once the gate is opened, the barrage of complaints is such that Mycroft is forced to seal the cat flap off, trapping Sherlock in the house and letting himself in for more than a month of solid hell. It’s as if Sherlock, having known the freedom of having it all his own way as king of the street, refuses to go back to being a mere kitten in a single house.
Mycroft is treated to endless yowling, growling, meowing, and chirping. When the kitten isn’t howling to disrupt his sleep, he’s following his owner around the house and meowing at him in varied tones as if carrying on a one-sided conversation. Mycroft tries to shut Sherlock out of the study so he can focus, but the cat howls disconsolately in the hallway until he surrenders, then curls up in the basket and chews on his catnip mouse while giving what Mycroft fancies is a baleful stare.
He fights against reading human motivations into Sherlock’s behavior, but it’s hard to avoid: his face and voice are so expressive, and Mycroft’s mind so trained to reading intention from behavior, that every disobedience seems to be an act of rebellion or spite. Sherlock learns how to shift the kitchen taps, so that Mycroft sometimes comes home to the water running merrily over random possessions placed in the sink: socks, knickknacks, anything sized for the mouth of a cat. He regularly overturns his food and water dishes, sometimes while Mycroft is away and sometimes while Mycroft is standing in the room, watching him do it. The websites suggest that a misbehaving cat should be scolded, squirted with a bottle of water, or startled by clapping or finger-snapping. Sherlock pretends not to hear scolding, ignores the water bottle to the point where he is dripping with retaliatory bursts but still refusing to acknowledge being wet, and the sole time Mycroft tries clapping at him, Sherlock looks at him with an expression of such perfect disdain that Mycroft locks himself in his study and pretends the cat doesn’t exist for the rest of the night.
Mycroft still resists the urge to remove Sherlock from his house until the day he darts out the door when the housekeeper comes in and is nearly run over by a car. The housekeeper calls him in a panic, and he has to hurry home to send his personal assistant darting in and out of traffic after Sherlock for twenty minutes before he can return to work. The next day, he procures his staff’s assistance in stuffing the cat- yowling with displeasure- into a carrier, and drives him to a so-called “no kill” shelter.
“He’s a very difficult animal, and I find my life is not as conducive as I first thought to having a cat,” Mycroft says. The woman at the counter- unmarried looking for boyfriend, two cats, no children, forensic pathologist at a central London hospital, unspeakably hideous jumper with kittens gamboling on the front, clearly an unpaid volunteer- has a distinct air of disapproval about her, but warms when he relates the story of the escape into traffic.
“You poor, sweet boy,” she coos at the cat in a way that makes Mycroft want to cringe in embarrassment. Sherlock’s yowls have taken on a plaintive tone. “Daddy just doesn’t have enough time for you, does he? You lovely boy, you. How old is he? Not a year yet?”
“About eight months,” Mycroft says.
“Well, babies are easiest to rehome, and seniors the hardest,” the woman says, beaming at him. “Nobody wants an elderly cat, poor things. But he’s not quite kitten, not quite adult, shouldn’t be that tough with such a handsome little man.” She pokes her fingers through the mesh front of the carrier, and Sherlock sniffs at them delicately. “I may take him myself actually, I’ve been thinking about getting another.” She laughs self-deprecatingly. “Well, I always am. It’s hard to see so many homeless cats all the time and not want to take them home!”
Mycroft has successfully divested himself of this unwanted responsibility without alerting the unctuous Saughton, he’s ready to slip out the door, and yet: he feels a small pang of conscience as he touches the handle. Whether it’s for the cat or for its new owner, he can’t say. He fishes a card out of his pocket and extends it to the doctor. “My phone number,” he clarifies, when she just looks at his hand with a puzzled expression. “If you have too much trouble with him, I could- well.” She gives him a look as if she’s about to start cooing over him the way she did the cat, and Mycroft edges his way nervously to the door and flees.
---
Mycroft doesn’t miss the cat, not one whit; his life is much calmer and more organized with no messes, dead wildlife, or background noise. But somehow, Sherlock’s fate is never very far from his mind. After all, the cat is just a cat and it can’t help its nature; Mycroft can’t imagine what a suitable home for the creature would look like, he simply knows it isn’t his.
It’s also hard to forget Sherlock given Dr. Hooper’s habit of calling him every week or two to update him on the cat’s status. The first call is the day after he hands Sherlock over. “Yes, um, this is Dr. Hooper? Oh, I don’t think I ever gave you my name, but we met at the shelter.”
“Yes, of course,” Mycroft says, his heart dropping a bit at the prospect of having to keep his word and take the cat back already.
“I just wondered, has Sherlock been around other cats before? Only he can’t get along with my two, he’s constantly bullying them and trying to pick fights. Poor Toby, just this morning Sherlock chased him around the flat until he ran under the sofa to hide and I had to come rescue him. He’s been sneezing dust all day.”
“I’m busy just now, but I can come by later-”
“Oh no, you don’t need to do that!” Dr. Hooper says. “I just wondered if you knew his history, if he was picked on by his littermates or anything. Cats are just cats, you know, if they’re acting odd it’s usually because of something in their past.”
Two weeks later, Dr. Hooper lets him to know she’s admitting defeat: “He just won’t get along with Toby and Daisy, so he’s still bored all the time. He got stuck behind the radiator the other day and nearly singed himself, did I tell you? Anyway, don’t worry, I know a lot of cat people, I’ll find him a good place.”
After that, it’s biweekly updates on the latest people that have rejected Sherlock, sometimes on sight, sometimes after a night or two of cat-related chaos, until Dr. Hooper has been steadily hunting for a new owner for three months.
“I think I’ve done it this time,” she announces one afternoon. At the beginning he would allow Dr. Hooper to go to voicemail and call her back in the evenings, but over the past few months he’s become surprisingly invested in her search for a new owner for Sherlock. Despite himself, he also enjoys hearing tales of Sherlock’s misadventures with a peculiar mix of annoyance and schadenfreude.
“It’s a friend of a friend, this doctor who used to be in the Army. John Watson. He’s had him two whole days and hasn’t complained yet! And what do you think, Sherlock got himself into a crime scene and helped solve a murder!” She tells the story with relish, and that’s the last Mycroft hears from her.
Two weeks later, he dials Dr. Hooper’s number for the first time ever, to ask why she hasn’t reported in on Sherlock. “Oh, he’s still with Dr. Watson!” she says. “I saw him at the hospital the other day and he was complaining about how difficult Sherlock is, but when I offered to take him back, he wouldn’t hear of it. I think this is really his forever home this time!”
Mycroft considers for several whole minutes before he follows through on his impulse to investigate Dr. John Watson. His time is better occupied by national security matters than with the doings of an obstreperous Siamese cat who lived in Mycroft’s home for a few months. And yet.
When the background check comes out clear, Mycroft engineers a chance meeting with Dr. Watson. “You’re the man who took that strange cat of Dr. Hooper’s,” Mycroft says innocently when they’re introduced. Watson has fur on his turn-ups and his upper thighs, and a series of tiny teeth marks on the cuff of his right shirtsleeve. “What’s he like to live with? Hellish, I imagine.”
“Oh,” Dr. Watson says, smiling as if remembering a private joke. “I’m never bored.”