The End of a Dream

Title: The End of a Dream (A Science Other than Deduction Ficlet)
Author: ExcentrykeMuse
Fandom(s): Harry Potter Series and BBC Sherlock
Pairing(s): (past) fem!Harry/Sherlock, (possible) au!fem!Harry/Mycroft
Summary: Mycroft remembers the magical girl he once loved the night before his wedding…

It was the night before his wedding.

Mycroft knew he was being irrational.  Celia was a good sort of girl from the correct sort of family and would make an excellent mother to his children, but he could never get Amy Potter out of his mind.  He asked the PM for a favor, twenty minutes alone in his office.

He stood in front of the proper portrait and looked at it.  “I need to speak to Amy Potter, the Countess Black,” he told it.  Lord, he felt like a fool.  He just waited and waited.  He was about to leave, he had even turned to the door, when a harassed looking Amy Potter stepped out of the picture frame.

She was wearing what seemed to be a dark green skirt, a white blouse, and a dark satin brown vest with crawling vines on it.  The sleeves were billowing as if they were from the early nineteen hundreds, but she wore them as if they were de rigeur.  “I was reading my son a bedtime story, Lord Holmes, I don’t appreciate this.  You’re lucky you have a high enough position in the government and that you were my contact.”

“You have a son,” he stated.  He pressed his hand to his stomach.  Mycroft shouldn’t be surprised.  The last time he’d seen her, she’d been engaged, and now five years later she was married with a child.  “I’m sorry.  I shouldn’t have called you.  I knew you were affianced last time we met.”

“What is it, Holmes?” she asked, all fight going out of her.

“It’s the night before my wedding.”

She looked shocked and flicked her hair behind her ear.  For once her fingers didn’t slide through it in that way that mentally drove him to distraction, an innocent seduction.  This seemed to be the action of a wife or a mother who wouldn’t put up with such nonsense.  “What did you want from me?” she asked, uncharacteristically quiet.

“I wanted to see if I should go through with it.”

“I always took you as a man who knew his own mind.”

With those words, he was in front of her in a matter of moments, cupping the back of her head so that she was looking up at him.  “You, it’s always been you, you impossible creature.  It’s you that I’ve wanted for the better part of a decade, and you’ve always been just out of my grasp.”

“I’m a mother and a widow—“ she explained.  “Cedar needs me.”

What a peculiar name for a child.  Still, wizards must be wizards, he supposed.  He still didn’t know Amy’s actual name.  He knew she was Potter.  That was as close as he came.  He was holding Potter, the Countess Black, in his arms—for the first time.  She must have another name now.  Her husband’s name, whoever he turned out to have been.  “How did it happen?” he asked quietly.

“A Muggleborn.  Retribution for the war.  We weren’t even involved but we were from the wrong House.”

None of that made much sense to Mycroft, but he accepted it.

Her gray eyes darted up to his dark ones and he found he could not read them.  “Tell me to go and you’ll never see me again,” he promised, “even if I become Prime Minister instead of Leader of the Opposition.”  That had been a nice little turn of events.  The former Prime Minister had been ousted after a show of No Confidence when he lost the last election for the party when he should have easily won it, and now Mycroft had taken power. 

“We live in different worlds, Mycroft.  I am not my sister.  I will not mix business with pleasure.”

And didn’t that feel like a slap against the cheek?  He released his hand from behind her head and nodded to her.  He ran his hands down her arms and took her hands.  “At least tell me your name.  As a wedding gift.”

She leaned up instead and kissed his cheek.  “Goodnight, Lord Holmes.”  And with that she stepped into the painting and he was standing alone, once again, in an office that might one day be his.