Holme Again

13

The twenty-second of December. Three days until Christmas. We'd broken up from school on the seventeenth. Mycroft had made no move to decorate the house in anyway for Christmas, but I'd stick a few sprigs of holly here and there, mostly in the helmets of the suit of armour. Which was why I was surprised that morning to find a tree in the living room. Quite a small one, but a Christmas tree nonetheless; it even had a star on top.

"Why the change of h- I mean, mind?"

"I thought you might like it. "

"Since when do you do things because you think people might like it?"

"Just this once. "

I chuckled. How Mycrofty.

That afternoon we played chess while the wind howled outside. Mycroft won every single time of course, but even so, it was quite fun.

Later, after dinner, we were both reading on the sofa in the living room, when I heard an engine noise. It was simultaneously similar to an aeroplane and the whirring of helicopter blades. The sound got louder, then faded away again. I didn't think about it again for another three minutes. Not until I heard a different noise. That of an explosion.

My blood ran cold, and my heart skipped a beat. Two, three beats. Then more engine noise. Lots more engine noise. Never-ending. Never-ending explosions. One after the other. I had been sitting at the other end of the sofa to Mycroft when it began; we had been as far away as was spatially possible because we both liked our personal space. By the time the seventh bomb was heard, I was somehow pressed right up against him. I must has unconsciously slid closer to him with each explosion.

I expected him to push me away, and I really wouldn't have minded that, but instead, after a few moments' hesitation, he closed his book and reached his arm out, with his hand coming to read on my left shoulder, the one facing away from him.

The bombs continued to fall for a long time, not all of them at the same distance. Some were closer, some further away. All of them terrifying.

"I don't want to die," I found myself whispering.

"You won't, Magnus, they seem to be targeting the warehouses and factories some miles away. "

"I know. This- this fear is irrational, stupid. I don't know why I-"

"It is not stupid. Neither is it irrational. This war is stupid, and the politicians behind it even more so. You are right to be frightened, Magnus. It's a human survival instinct. And if one of them missed their mark..."

We stayed almost huddled in that sofa all night, even after the bombs had stopped. I thought I'd be safe here, out in the countryside. That was the whole point of the evacuations, but it seemed we couldn't be safe. Not while there was a war on.

A few times, Mycroft let me have a sip of his whisky. I think we both needed Dutch courage that night.