mybrainrots:

ibelieveinmycroft:

‘Library’ was really far too grand a word for that cramped, cluttered little upstairs room, stacked with precariously balanced books. What had started life as their mother’s study, with space only for mathematics textbooks and the occasional novel, had quickly grown into a way to indulge their brilliant boys’ peculiar interests.

A childhood had passed in that tiny room. It was where Mycroft absorbed foreign languages and memorised the dates of every king, every battle, every case of political scandal. It was where Sherlock learnt the properties of Molybdenum and first read of the case of Jack the Ripper. It was where Sherlock had first found The Black Corsair, buried underneath a stack of sociology journals, and where Mycroft read Machiavelli, Spinoza and Nietzsche and began to form ideas of a career he could pursue. They gathered books on every topic; apiaries and espionage and linguistics and pharmaceutics. The atlases were covered in annotations. Sherlock cast anything that could not hold his interest down on to the floor, kicking the books beneath the shelves. Mycroft would always retrieve them, but anything deemed tiresome by them both would be hurled out of the window, knocking over their mother’s potted plants in the process. The books climbed up towards the ceiling.

There was never enough space in that small room for the two of them, but they made do.

On the rare days when both of them find themselves back at the family home, they gravitate back towards that room and lose hours in the depths of the pages of a book on some obscure topic.

They still argue over who gets the armchair. They still throw books out of the window.

Not enough words for how much I love this