Who: Noah and Elias, with Micah and Simon toward the end What: Talking Noah down. Where: Four Queens, then Noah's place. When: Directly after Noah's unfortunate Vivienne encounter. Warnings/Rating: Swearing and unfortunateness.
It had taken Noah only moments to slip on his trousers, even with the nervousness of not being able to find the trouser legs and the jostle of tourists snickering behind their hands. It had taken only moments, but it felt like a lifetime. It was that classroom all over again, the children laughing, the body of the much larger bully pressing him against the wall. It felt like a lifetime, and by the time he had both legs in the khaki trousers he fled, not bothering with belt, button, or zipper. A dervish, shoving at the press of bodies with elbows and cheeks stained with damp embarrassment. In his mind, Mycroft was quiet, because it hardly seemed the time. Once the boy settled, he thought, he'd help pick up the pieces then. Mycroft was rather accustomed to picking up the pieces of dark haired young boys that mistakenly believed themselves to be men, after all.
It was early enough in the day that Fremont was wall-to-wall tourists, and Noah ducked into the Four Queens, unthinking, just to get away from the heat and crowd. His stepmother was likely home, and he wasn't interested in seeing her. The people at the Nugget knew him on sight, and it wasn't an option either. He plowed through the casino without looking, not stopping until he reached the bathroom in the farthest recesses of the neon-lit floor, far away from the clang and clatter of slot machines, far enough from the tables that even the gamblers didn't venture there. He slammed his fist into a swinging stall door, and then he braced himself against the frame, head bowed, inky black hair falling into eyes gone red-lined.
This casino was not one of Elias’ favorite places, but he planned on spending a lot of time in Las Vegas, and living there in the foreseeable future, so it was not only Sherlock that wanted to see everything. Sherlock cataloged the sights and the smells, finding the bits and bobs that made it possible for him to identify someone who worked at the casino or even walked through it, everything from geographical notes to the complex arrangements of the tables. Elias had been more interested in the people and the way the lights played strange games on the eyes, and while Sherlock had muttered in the back of his mind about the cocktail waitresses’ outfits, Elias had taken the time to wander around and drink coke on the rocks.
Elias, preoccupied in the golden glow of the light display over the casino floor, would not have noticed Noah parting the sea of people, but Sherlock called his attention to it immediately. Frowning, Elias left his glass on the tray of a passing waitress who barely noticed the extra weight as he followed the kid’s path through the casino and into the pseudo privacy of the back restroom. He stopped there, the epitome of normal in his fitted jeans and blackly red shirt. “...Noah?” A step closer. “What’s wrong?” Sherlock coldly cataloged Noah’s appearance, the loose hem of his jeans and the state of his shoes.
Noah turned quickly enough that it was rather plain he did not expect to be interrupted. The phone call from Micah, which had interrupted his thoughts moments earlier, was forgotten and he blinked red-rimmed eyes before even recognizing the man in front of him as someone he knew. He did up the zipper and button with shaking fingers, and the belt buckle eluded him for a few more, long, extended moments. “I’d like to be alone,” he said, or tried to, the words broken by hitching and gasping and very messy tears.
He contradicted the hitched request with more words, words that came with pacing. Back, forth, back, forth along the tile of the bathroom floor. His fingers lost themselves in his inky hair, pushing the thick mess away from features gone pale. “It was nothing. Simply. Nothing. It’s been. Not since school, you see. And everyone saw. They jeered. Snickered behind their hands. I thought she was interested, and it’s all his fault, the one in my mind with his false confidence and- I would never have done- My stepmother will kill me if she finds out.” Here, his head jerked up, true fear in the sea blue eyes. The car had stopped in front of. He paced again. “No, this is the Four Queens, and chances are no one that knows her saw.” But his voice climbed, because this was unlikely.
Mycroft merely sighed. Honestly, this was getting out of control. The boy was certain to hyperventilate at any moment.
Sherlock was out of his depth and since Noah’s state had no real immediate effect on his life and was nothing more than a peripheral point of interest, he stopped paying attention. Elias appreciated the extra focus, his eyes dropping down Noah’s mussed appearance and darkening with obvious, serious concern. “Noah,” he said, quiet, trying to interrupt this panicked flow of verbal thought, and, after a moment, the physical lines of Noah’s movement across the tile. “Noah.” Elias put his hands up, palms open, trying to hinder the panic. “It’s not nothing. What happened to you?” Sherlock casually dropped in some information about this stepmother, and Elias’ dark eyes went narrow and then wide, shocked, but he kept his exclamation back.
“I thought she liked me, you see,” Noah said, almost unaware of Elias’ raised hands, his voice in the quiet. Mycroft was not particularly interested in sharing this particular fiasco with the man who carried his brother around in his mind, but perhaps some good could come of it. After all, achieving calm before seeing Micah and Simon could only be a good thing. “She offered me a ride home, and I asked her in, and she seemed to like me. I don’t understand how I could be so stupid.” He sounded terribly British when he said the word stupid, and his hands became lost in his hair as he tugged. “She asked me what I’d do to her, you know, and I thought perhaps she was dirty, like some girls are in cinema.” He looked up then. “She was from your door,” he said almost accusingly, as if they didn’t share the same door, when all was said and done. “She had books, you see.”
If Noah ended up calm at the end of this conversation, it would be no help of Sherlock’s, who was a babbling brook of casually intrusive information that he would have quite willingly enumerated out loud if he could. Elias kept him out, so aggressively that there was a short battle of wills that lasted about thirty seconds and ended with Sherlock angry but silent. He stood still during this, and afterward his dark eyes focused with sympathetic understanding. “It’s not stupid. We all want to hope for the best. Especially with women.” He offered a lame but knowing smile. “What happened after you asked her in?”
“She asked that I remove my-” Noah said, face going unbelievably red, he opened his mouth, attempted to continue onward, failing in a grand show of lips that open and closed, resembling a fish. Finally, Mycroft, tired of this entire ordeal, exerted his influence, and it was a rather striking difference. The pacing ceased, Noah’s shoulders went back, and he stood straighter. One ankle crossed over the other, and though there was no umbrella there to lean upon there was certainly the illusion of one. “I warned him. Let it not be said I did not attempt to intervene,” Noah’s voice said, but it was a much more subtle British accent, the voice impossibly older somehow, nonplussed. “She asked he remove his trousers. Foolishly, he did as requested, and she set him on the side of the street in a rather busy crowd of tourists. Badly done, but not unexpectedly so. He is quite right, however, she is from our door.” He said our as if the door belonged to Elias as well, as if it was a shared space. He ended it all with a rather uncomfortable, discomforting smile.
Sherlock knew Mycroft and so did Elias, but Elias wasn’t Noah and he was the one who cared about the kid so he was the one that was going to be doing the talking. His features hardened. “What a bitch,” he said, voice dripping with sarcastic LA. “I can see he’s upset than, maybe, you or I would be. Bad memories? What’s the deal with the stepmother?” Elias didn’t care about privacy and with Sherlock in his head, he probably already suspected the answers to his question anyway. Sherlock said he’d need to see the home to confirm, but Elias told him to shut up again. “Who do you think she is on the other side? Moriarty?” Both Elias and Sherlock jumped to worst-case scenario on that count.
“Tell my dear brother that everyone is not Moriarty,” Mycroft said with a superior roll of his eyes and his lips gone all unforgiving line. “Likely Irene Adler, based on tells, gender associations, the books she had in her possession - from early in the book series, rather than the later books that would appeal to someone with Moriarty in his mind. Sentimental reading, not instructive,” Mycroft continued, the word sentimental coming out like a rather unpleasant smell. “Combined with the fact that Irene Adler was among those collected at Baker street for our inspiring reunion, it is likely her, and if my dear brother didn’t already deduce that then being in your mind is clearly causing him to slip.” Again, that harmless smile, the one that said (perhaps) that he was a bit of a bumbling idiot, that no one should ever worry about him in a serious way. He waved a hand. “The stepmother is unimportant. He’s merely concerned she’ll have seen him with another woman. Insignificant. ”
For once, Elias was as annoyed as Sherlock. “Then Irene is hanging out with a real piece of work.” Elias wasn’t as angry as he would have been if someone had actually laid hands on Noah, but he was still pissed enough to want to throw a punch at someone that wasn’t there. He swayed back and forth on his feet as a tree in the wind, very gently to either side, as if deciding which angle to strike from. It wasn’t conscious. “I’m not what’s causing him to slip, Mycroft, and if you’re so fucking smart you would have figured that out by now. Why would stepmom care about Noah seeing women, because I’m starting to get a feeling I’m not going to like that answer.”
“Irene Adler is hanging out in a thirty-year-old woman who has a teddy bear on her key chain. What does that say about young Vivienne?” Mycroft asked. He began to move then, a slow cross from one side of the unfortunate lavatory to the next. “My brother is slipping-” All of Elias’ words were returned to him in precisely the same tone he had stated them, “because Moriarty threatened someone, and now he’s afraid he’ll follow through. Also, there’s the matter of his monumental lie.” Because there was that small thing. “He ought to let John Watson get his ridiculous emotional reaction to that over with, so we can all move on to larger concerns, of which Irene Adler is not one.” Noah’s stepmother earned another, smaller wave of his hand and two fingers to his lips. “She’s been sleeping with him since his father died. Hardly important.”
Elias moved up close, (ironically) far closer to Mycroft than he had been to Noah, and though it was obvious that he was in no danger of actually physically damaging the other man, there was something casual violent about the way he held himself, as if he found hitting someone a lot easier than continuing the conversation. “For smart men, you’re both fucking stupid.” It was so American, and he relished the phrase to make it sound even more so without thinking. Elias didn’t do things by halves. “The lie was for all of you, and he is letting John be emotional--and you too, and if you want my opinion, you’re both being little girls about it. Grow up, Mycroft. Nobody in the position of parent should be fucking their kid, and you know it. If you weren’t so caught up in your own pathetic political bullshit, you’d have your priorities straight. Now fuck off and help the kid pull back together long enough to get home.”
Mycroft, quite tellingly, did not bat an eyelash or take even a solitary step back in response to the crowding. Someone has harmless as he appeared should, certainly, but he merely smiled that infuriating almost-smile, the mocking one. “The lie was not for us. Do not pretend anyone threatened me to make my dear brother comply. And, whatever the reason for the lie, it is done with now. He is supposed to be dead, and his death is supposed to ensure whatever retribution was to be exacted not be exacted. Now, it no longer matters. Now, he is merely uncertain how to come clean. I know my brother. He did the same manner of thing when he’d no idea how to tell mummy he’d done something he ought not have done.” He snorted, a delicate British snort. “I’m trying to endeavor the boy finds a new romantic interest, and that he find a job so that he may leave home. Do you truly think five minutes in a casino lavatory makes you any kind of expert? As for getting him home, I’ve already arranged for his friends to be there once he arrives.” He smiled, and the smile did not reach his eyes. “Do not pretend to know me, merely because you know my brother. You make the mistake of assuming our opinions of one another are not clouded by the past.” Mycroft did like to hear himself talk, it seemed.
Elias just looked down into Noah’s face, watching the movement of the muscles, particularly around the mouth and neck, that made Mycroft so much different than Noah. As an artist he could do fifty portraits of the two men and not one would look alike. It appealed to him as a challenge, but then the thought of doing portraits of Mycroft made his mouth twist as if he’d eaten a bad lime. It stunned him how willfully ignorant Sherlock and his brother could be of each other. Prejudice, Elias figured. Sherlock was uncharacteristically silent. “No. I really don’t.” Elias took three steps back to open his shoulders toward the door. He wasn’t letting Noah out of his sight until he was sure that the kid wouldn’t fall apart where he stood.
Mycroft found the idea of his brother inhabiting anyone who cared first and thought second interesting, but he did not say as much. He watched the other man back toward the door, and he gave in and sighed. The motion brought his shoulders down slightly, and the smile became less of a sneer. “I’ll ensure he walks home, and I won’t give him control back until he’s safely with the Detective Inspector and that other boy, the one with the unfortunate piercings and tattoos.” He hesitated then, unsure how much to impart, and he decided Elias was, perhaps, trustworthy on this count. “He was rather bullied as a child, it seems, to a very damaging degree. It’s a mystery, as it were,” he finished, leaving the rest to his brother, who he knew would find the bait impossible to resist.
Elias was too busy being pissed at these invisible bullies from Noah’s past to notice Sherlock’s increased interest. Sherlock had been bullied too, as all strange children are, but half the time he hadn’t noticed, and a good portion of the rest he had done a fair accounting of himself. The small percentage of events that didn’t fit into either of those categories, Mycroft had handled, a fact Sherlock suspected but didn’t necessarily know for sure. Elias had his ass handed to him regularly when he was a kid, and bullying amounted to not pissing off the wrong gangs and wearing the right colors so you didn’t get shot in front of your house--and that was not an exaggeration. “Micah is good,” Elias said, unaware of who the hell had the unfortunate piercings and tattoos. It would probably be easy to find out. “Let’s go, then.” He crossed his arms, still thin and dark but less warm as he could have been, a sharp black stone under the thick ash tree that had grown around it.
Mycroft merely quirked a brow, and it was somehow all wrong on Noah’s young face. “You’re coming?”
“To make sure he gets there, or in case he needs to look around and see a friend, yeah,” Elias said, expression still stone bleak.
Mycroft was not truly surprised this man did not trust him to walk from one end of of Fremont street to the other, but he said nothing. Sherlock’s lack of trust in him always stung, even if it was sometimes deserved, even if he would never say as much. He pushed past the other man with a very polite “pardon,” and he made his way out of the casino in quite a different than Noah had made his way in. Mycroft was careful to touch nothing and no one - who honestly knew where these people had been. He did not ensure Elias followed, and he kept control of the boy until Avenue 8 Studios came into view in all their rather unimpressive splendor. He’d no idea Elias was already familiar with the apartment complex and all its rather unsavory attributes, nor did he care. It was bad enough he had to “live” there himself. This little trick of Irene Adler’s was going to cause him a month of work. That was his final thought before he gave control back to Noah, who was ready to slip his hand into the key of the apartment.
“There,” Micah said with a motion of the hand that did not hold the cane, standing on the walk near the entrance to the complex, his face creased with lines of stress and discomfort, hand curled tightly around the curve of the cane’s handle. “And it appears Elias has joined him as well,” he mused a moment later when he saw the darker man near Noah, glancing back towards Simon with lifted brows. They had not been there long, having beat the pair to the complex by only a matter of five minutes, but it was five anxious minutes with no knowledge of what had happened to cause such an outburst from his new... friend, he supposed. It was a strange word in his thoughts, something Micah had truly thought he would have no more of. Losing people was something he simply couldn’t handle, it seemed, and opening up to others, letting them see his weakness, it only opened one up for pain.
“Noah, Elias,” Micah called out by way of greeting, already making his way towards the pair.
“Elias?” Simon asked. It wasn’t the most fortuitous of first meetings, but sometimes that was just how things shook down. Simon hadn’t met Elias, or Noah, for that matter. Noah had seemed alright from the little they’d spoken thus far, but he had no clue what to expect from the guy after he sent such a freaked out text. He looked normal enough, if totally harried.
Simon, for his part, was unfortunately recognizable to anyone who had glanced at a newspaper in the last few months. His dark hair was still shaved into a mohawk, and there were small black gauges in both his ears. Black writing on his skin peeped now and again over the top of a low-necked, torn up white shirt, and his jeans looked like they were as old as he was. He sidled up to the pair alongside Micah. He still had no clue what had actually happened, but hey, meeting somebody was always a good time to jump into crisis mode, right? “Hey,” he said, to the pair of them, glancing over the tough looking guy with the paint under his nails with the air of somebody practiced at judging, before anything else, whether he could take somebody in a fight if he had to. “Nice to meet you,” he said to them both, with a vague humor. Weirdness. “So what’s up? What happened?”
Despite his assembled attire and good coloring, the expression Elias wore as he shadowed Noah at a distance looked very much like that a judge might wear at trial when grim evidence had recently been presented to a horrified jury. His hands were outside his pockets and the clean-shaven set of his chin and mouth gave him a hawklike shadow around the eyes. Sherlock assisted the match-up of Simon’s face to the context of the newspaper, but Elias was neither intimidated by the “unfortunate piercings and tattoos” or especially impressed by them. Instead he would wait to see what kind of intelligence Simon displayed through his friendship with Noah (or Micah? he wasn’t sure which). “Hey,” he said, with a jerk of his chin upward that came straight of an LA gutter and suited a much younger man. As he neared, he nodded a greeting at Micah, unsmiling, and slowed so he could match his progress as they stepped up behind Noah to make a very odd cluster in front of the kid’s front door. He didn’t say anything, watching as Mycroft’s influence wore off.
Noah was in the middle of the living room before he had his wits about him enough to realize there were three men in his stepmother’s sad excuse for a room. The apartment was like all the apartments in the complex, burn holes in the carpet, stained popcorn ceiling, a slight smell of mold covered by stale cigarettes and the sting of alcohol. It was hot, and Noah crossed to crank up the only partially working air conditioning. It was a distraction, you see, from trying to figure out what had happened to lead him there. Or, rather, a moment to think it over. The apartment’s two bedrooms were visible through open doors, though the clutter that had been cleared out of his own room for Cory’s recent visit had since been returned to the smaller, unused room. He turned back from the air conditioning, and he looked at the three collected men, which only made him feel rather more self-conscious about himself. An unthinking tantrum in a restroom was one thing, but this was like a trial. “I realize I had a rather poor reaction to recent events,” he said vaguely, shoving his hands into his pockets. “But I’m fine now. Thank you for the concern.” Red cheeks and eyes that wouldn’t meet anyone’s gaze accompanied the speech.
“Fine. Right,” Micah said as he stood awkwardly in living room, cane supporting much of his weight. “I see we gathered here to listen to one another lie. Excellent way to spend time with one another.” There was sarcasm threaded through his words, giving them a certain amount of weight. He believed Noah was fine just as much as he knew he himself was ‘fine’. It was what one said when you would rather hole up on your own in a pity party rather than accept any help that might be offered and offered freely.
Glancing around for a moment, Micah sought out a place to sit, finally settling on an old chair and lowering himself down with a sigh, leg stretched out in front of him as he rubbed at his hip in a gesture that required no thought or consideration. “I shall simply make myself comfortable, then, until you decide you might be willing to share the truth. You don’t mind, do you?” Brows lifted and Micah canted his head to the side, a faint purse of his lips cementing his seriousness.
Simon just leaned against the wall inside the doorway, watching Noah go to the air conditioner and come back to be berated by Micah. The tack surprised him a little - then again, Micah knew Noah better than he did, so maybe he had a better grip on whether Noah needed snapping out of whatever funk had made him want to quit. “You seemed like you were really into the band idea,” he said, folding his arms. “What the fuck happened to make you change your mind?” He didn’t point out the red, downcast eyes, because that seemed sort of unfair, prodding him about that.
Elias watched as Simon took up a position against the door, and he was satisfied with Micah’s obvious intent to linger until Noah was in better shape. Elias’ own determination wore off to put Noah into hands that were better at support than accusations, and he was more taken with the idea to randomly roam the street and see if Sherlock could get him a make and model on pseudo-Irene’s car, just because he wanted to feel effective. Sherlock was dismissive, but Elias had little patience with Sherlock’s attitudes. By the time any one thought to look up, he had vanished out of his place in the doorway.
Noah looked up just in time to see Elias leave, and his immediate thought was relief, even through Micah’s harsh words. One less person to remove from the premises, was his current musing, and he shrugged his shoulders without pulling his hands from said pockets once Micah silenced. “My stepmother will mind, once she arrives,” he said, because she surely would. Or perhaps she wouldn’t; Simon and Micah were both rather fit. The idea should have bothered him, but it didn’t, and he merely sighed and wandered into the kitchen to pour himself a glass of lemonade. It had been a hot, long walk. He put the jug on the living room table a moment later, along with two plastic cups. “If either of you would like some,” he said, not at his best as a host just then. “I’ve had a change of heart,” he added, because surely he was allowed to have one of those. Elias, who knew the truth of it, was gone, and he’d every intention of salvaging his pride now.
By the time Micah looked towards where he had seen Elias, the man was already gone, and it lent him to a furrow of his brow, his lips pressed in a thin, straight line. So Noah lived with his stepmother, a bit of information to file away, though he had to admit some concern at the state of his living conditions. He was hardly one to judge as his place was sparse and littered with the bits and pieces of life that he couldn’t be bothered to pick up, but still. “A change of heart?” Micah echoed after a moment, giving Noah a long, tired look. “Lovely.” He pushed himself up to his feet with a shake of his head, bracing himself heavily upon his cane.
“Next time you’ve a change of heart, yes? Do take a moment to take into consideration those that your reconsideration might affect. I’ve no time or patience for children who can’t hold onto a decision for more than a week.” There was a tight thread of anger in his voice, pain and something akin to disappointment colouring his words.
Simon was capable of being as stubbornly steadfast as a rock against a current. It had gotten him into some fights, for sure - it had also gotten him out of some, and helped him get through of some others without getting snapped in half. It was a quality he carried with him in all things. If there was one thing he knew, it was how to pick his battles, and this was one he felt just fine choosing. When Micah began to turn for the door in disappointment, Simon’s stance just hardened. He wasn’t moving.
“You said you had a bad reaction to something,” Simon said. “You could at least tell us what it was if you’re going to fucking blow us both off. Something made you change your mind. So go on and tell us.”
Noah’s response to Micah’s anger and Simon’s cursing was rather simplistic. He turned, walked into his stepmother’s room, slammed the door and proceeded to climb over the balcony and drop down to the street below, all in the span of under a minute. He was ill-suited to handle anger, tirades, after what had transpired. He couldn’t think, really, and it was an unthinking thing, the escape, but he needed to be left alone just then, to breathe. He didn’t consider consequences either - his stepmother’s eventual return, or the fact that he would certainly need to talk to Micah and Simon eventually. This had all been a terrible idea - friends, a band, anything more than his flute and his stepmother. That old man in his head had caused these things, and Noah was determined to unravel them. Friendships and plans, those things worked for other people, not him. He ducked into the casino nearest the apartment, where it was easy to get lost amid the ding of the machines.
Micah watched through narrowed eyes as Noah removed himself from the room, the sound of the slamming door echoing in the apartment. A moment passed where he did nothing, just waiting, and his small amount of patience wore out as he moved over to open the door, pushing it open and giving a brief look inside. The sight of the balcony was enough to give him some information, and it was with a dark expression that he turned back towards Simon. “He’s left. He’s bloody run away. I cannot believe this nonsense!”
Simon ran a hand through his hair and shook his head. “Let him blow off steam,” he said. It’d been a long fucking week, and maybe he just didn’t have the energy to get pissed off about this. He’d been excited about the idea of the band, and he wasn’t willing to completely give it up yet, but it also wasn’t enough to get his dander up. If anything, he wanted to smack Noah for getting Micah upset. “He’ll get it out of his system, and we can deal with him afterward.” He shook his head, and jerked his head toward the door. “Come on. Let’s get a beer and pretend this shit never happened.”