Chapter Text
Mycroft woke every day at precisely 05:25. When his damned alarm clock went off five minutes later, he would calmly dismiss it with a gentle tap as he adjusted his shirt sleeves from in front of his mirror, where he would invariably already be standing, dressed and sighing.
When he arrived at his breakfast table approximately seven minutes later, give or take a moment for changes to his ablutions, he would find his three preferred papers; two in English, one in Mandarin, though he'd never admit which ones. The proper papers would be on his desk when he arrived at work. These were purely for his own enjoyment and intrigue.
There would also be one cup of tea with lemon, piping hot and magically poured at the perfect time. Never a pot and never accompanied by pastry. He hadn't time, and he did so hate for food to go to waste. He would take the five minutes required to finish the tea and read through the headlines for any scandals that may impact his day. Then he would pick up an umbrella and his jacket, regardless of whether or not it was likely to rain, and head out to the black car where Anthea would be waiting with the daily brief.
This routine settled him. It didn’t change. Variety was a waste of time, or so he attempted to tell himself each morning so that he didn’t scream.
Lately, Mycroft had been waking up earlier than normal. Lately, he had found a new hesitation in his step as he heads down the stairs to what would no doubt be a day of normalcy — chaotic, threat-avoiding, soul-destroying, secret-bearing normalcy. Because, if he was honest with himself for one moment (though he very rarely was), his routine was incredibly fucking lonely.
There was a tiny chance, a minuscule, infinitesimally, microscopic chance that all of this was in fact Sherlock’s fault.
Which honestly didn’t surprise him in the least.
If he paused in any way during the fanfare of his days for the past two weeks, he would hear himself in that voice of his that irritated even him. The one that sounded opulent beyond his station and disgustingly fashionable because he spent his days surrounded by RP prestige that made him wince. The one their grandfather loathed the whole time they’d been in school because it sounded nothing like either of their country-born, ‘no one is from London’ parents.
That statement — a lie — declaring ridiculous pride in isolation. If you seem slow to me, Sherlock, can you imagine what real people are like? He’d actually called everyone else goldfish. Goldfish . As though the joy of a creature who arrived at a new hope and contentment every day was something to be sneered at.
Not for the first time this Wednesday morning, Mycroft sighed. It had been a long two years with Sherlock away, but that was entirely on him and he knew it. Everyone had been trying. John, Mrs Hudson. Anthea. Lestrade. Eventually, of course, they all gave up. If he was going to ignore them, then perhaps that was his grief. Perhaps he needed the solitude in earnest. It ultimately wouldn’t have mattered that he was the only one who knew that Sherlock wasn’t actually dead. It changed nothing, in the end. This wasn’t his area, this feeling, this wavering of emotions. That was Sherlock’s speciality, whether he liked to admit it or not.
He stole a glance out the window as Anthea expounded on the seven current high-level threats that were the grief of the British People today, though they would never know it. He quite hated London. It wasn’t really the city’s fault, though it certainly didn’t help itself. It was more that he hated being in the centre of things, which was ironic given everything he did in any given week.
“Are you…quite well, sir?” Anthea inquired. He must not have heard her ask a question. He pulled forward the conversation to the forefront of his brain. She’d asked whether he wanted to attend the meeting today in person or just receive the notes after the fact.
He shook his head. “Notes, I should think. Also, please ask the driver to take me to Hyde Park. I need a walk.”
“Sir?” she said, brows knitting together. “We’ve not cleared it with security. They’ll be…paperwork later.”
“The park, Anthea,” he insisted.
She held her notebook a bit tighter, gripping with a vice-like hold to what would very quickly be a day that spiralled out of her control. She wouldn’t fight him, he knew that. Not because she couldn’t - she could, she frequently did, and more often than with anyone else in the world, she was successful in changing his mind. But she knew a lost cause when she encountered it and his voice had taken on that dangerous edge that often appeared when he was at his very witts end with the stupidity of people. She tapped on the glass gently and gave a whispered instruction. The car moved imperceptibly to the left and he felt his haunches settle.
“Is it anything I can help with?” she asked him gently.
He shook his head, barely a gesture, and pulled his phone from his pocket. There was nothing there he hadn’t already seen, dealt with, or answered for, but the distraction of the screen was comforting. He opened his contacts list; six names appeared.
Anthea. Sherlock. More usefully, John. His mother, because his father still had not worked out how to use the mobile they’d bought him for Christmas. Mrs Hudson, who would never dare call or text Mycroft personally but who frequently picked up when he could not sleep in the middle of the night for worrying about.
Gregory Lestrade, Scotland Yard .
In their terrible sans serif font, the words sat there judging him. He’d taken the number at Sherlock’s flat at one very ill-advised Guy Fawkes party, two, possibly even three years ago. Who even had Guy Fawkes parties past year seven? Still. He’d gone. He’d been almost jovial. He’d gone because, not a full month prior, Sherlock had stopped speaking to him for three weeks. When he’d received the invitation in a terse text message, he’d felt the worst of all human obligations about the subject; obligated.
Staring at it now, so many years later, he didn’t know why the mere act of having the number made him feel so hot and uncomfortable. He’d never used it. He and Lestrade had no common ground, nothing ever to discuss, and only spoke when Sherlock was in between them.
Though. That wasn’t strictly true. That night had been different. Of course, nights usually were when there was whisky involved.
Mycroft was a great many things; a genius, certifiably. An incurable anal retentive with tendencies towards neurodivergence. An unmitigated asshole when it came to almost all subjects regarding anything worth discussing. An indispensable asset to the British Nation. Controlled and disciplined to the point of regimen. The surface was carefully crafted. Most people assumed that he and Sherlock were entirely different in many ways.
But, the truth was that underneath all of that lay a quality that not many would have been able to pinpoint, not many would have found accurate.
Mycroft Holmes was a rapscallion.
In his younger days, he may have even occasionally been a knave. No one knew, of course, since that would not support his appearance, but under the thousand-pound suits and the carefully constructed hairstyle, he was without a doubt downright cheeky.
That night with the whisky, he’d told himself to stop after one drink. He’d told himself again after the third. By the fourth, he’d quite forgotten why he shouldn’t drink the delightfully smooth amber liquid that had been dropped off by one of his brother’s happy ‘clients’ and was about as old as John. The reasons he should have stopped became evident as soon as Gregory Lestrade was standing in front of him, with his damnable eye twinkle and his oddly cropped salt and pepper hair, telling him a story about a lad’s night he’d had in Tenerife. Mycroft had been to Tenerife several times and quite liked it there, actually. But he’d never had a lad’s night that had ended with two friends in the ocean with a male stripper who was insisting he was not, in fact, male.
As he told Mycroft this story, Gregory’s face lost ten years of worry and heartache and found instead a humour-filled grin that oozed cheek. Mycroft was a devout studier of facial expressions and therefore noticed the exact moment when Lestrade began to wonder why he was telling Mycroft Holmes, of all people, this particular story. His eyes grew the barest hint wider, his cheeks coloured almost imperceptibly at the thought, and he clutched his glass of brandy just the tiniest bit tighter.
Mycroft, suddenly drunk and afraid that Lestrade would realize his error and leave, had peppered the man with questions and a grin that was normally reserved for people he’d just bested in debate (or fucked, but that was not something he’d ever admit). Not his cheekiest of moments, not by a long shot, but the intention behind it was…not pure. Nonetheless, the grin came out.
It had worked.
Lestrade finished the story. Told two more. Listened when Mycroft blundered through a tale from his own uni days. They’d migrated to a sofa, they’d sat side-by-side, nothing but propriety between them, if one ignored the electric tension. Lestrade, picking up a call and replying in single words, had stood up suddenly and put down his glass.
“Have to go,” he’d said. Mycroft had been willing to hear apology and regret in his tone. “Neice is sick. Wouldn’t normally go like this, but her boyfriend is out of town and she’s alone in the flat.”
Mycroft had nodded, oddly grave and a little bit melancholy. “Family,” he’d replied. “It’s all we have, in the end.”
Lestrade had smiled a strange, wistful sort of smile before reaching out his hand. “Lemme put my mobile in yours. Just…in case.”
The end of the sentence had seemed to die midair, as though Gregory had just realised that he was giving Mycroft fucking Holmes his number; either that or he had realised he was reaching out to hold the phone of the most influential man in all of Britain; a phone that held exactly zero secrets since it was washed and wiped clean of anything sensitive at regular intervals throughout the day, not that Lestrade would know that. Mycroft, repeatedly reminding himself that he was not sober and not caring, had handed his phone over.
And so.
The number.
But there it sat. ‘In case’ had not yet happened, to either of them, it would seem. Logically, Mycroft knew that this was because Lestrade had come to his senses the next morning, given his head a shake at the ludicrous nature of the flirting he’d been party to the night before, and — rightly — moved on.
Mycroft had not been so lucky. For realising, as he had, that it had been flirting after all, Mycroft’s worldview had tilted ever so slightly. But he was a slow-moving sort of fellow and the months piled up and up and time moved on and on, as the bastard always does. So it had been two years since that night — probably only two, but possibly three. He had no idea why this day, of all days, had him staring at his phone screen positively wanting a conversation with the laid-back, easy-going, detective inspector. Gregory Lestrade, the owner of the singular smile. Gregory Lestrade, free citizen of the universe and holder of the title ‘most patient with Holmes siblings in known universe’.
Mycroft sighed again, sounding like a teenage girl even to his own years. Anthea paused in her constant typing on her phone yet again and looked at him with no small amount of concern.
“Sir?”
“It’s fine,” he insisted. She wouldn’t believe him, not really, but it was important to keep up appearances. The ‘fine’ really only meant that she didn’t have to do anything about his mood, and that’s all she really needed to hear anyway.
They pulled up to Marble Arch, and Mycroft watched as the slow-motion procession of People That Were Definitely Not Security Agents swept the field in the direction of the tree. They did this regularly, he knew the drill. People in striped polo shirts walking dogs that were not going to be memorable, a mother pushing a pram, the owner of the tea stand at the end of the walkway. These people moved discretely until Anthea listened to something in her earpiece and nodded.
“You’re clear to go. Am I coming with you?”
“No, thank you, Anthea. I’ll be just a half hour or so. I honestly just need…”
He stopped. There were a thousand different endings to that sentence. He said none of them.
After a hesitant pause, she nodded again and reached over to him to open his door. He stood, stepped out, and reached back for the umbrella she passed him. He didn’t need it. There wasn’t a cloud in the unnaturally blue, spring sky. He took it anyway.
He meandered past several forks in the road. The paths were completely empty, as he’d known they would be. This wasn’t a leisurely Saturday stroll where no one knew where he was except for the entirety of his security team. He realised as he walked between the budding planetrees that the gnawing in the pit of his stomach was unbearable loneliness. Even trying to walk through a park, he was unable to experience the basic human need of people-watching. He knew the field was being cleared ahead of him, that the solitude wasn’t real. He knew if he insisted, he could find the people being gently removed from the half kilometer ahead of him.
He’d known, of course, when he took this position. He’d been told. No attachments. It had felt easy at the time; pretending to be a low-level government official with few desires and no ambitions. Remain off the radar. He didn’t generally like people, found them so dreadfully dull and predictable. It had, five years ago, felt like the dream position. He had permission, an excuse even, to tell his mother that he was not married for Very Important Reasons.
So lost was he in his own stupid melancholy that he almost walked straight into the man that stood at the corner of the memorial. Crossroads, indeed.
He looked up in what he knew was an unfortunately comical expression of surprise and glared at the intrusion. He felt his cheeks heat as his mind caught up to him and he knew who it was.