A.N.: This is set before A Higher Dose, and will go some way to explain the little discussion about Anthea that happened in that story.

Warning: One use of strong language

Disclaimer: Don't own Sherlock

Anthea didn't know what kind of trouble Sherlock had got himself into this time, nor did she particularly care. All she knew for certain was that she was now in the back of a black Sedan with her boss, heading for the infamous 221b Baker Street.

She followed Mycroft through the door and up the stairs, keeping her gaze fixed on her phone but still being completely aware of her surroundings. She knew exactly what her job was on this visit: keep John Watson out of the way.

The doctor certainly didn't look happy when he saw who was on the other side of his front door.

"Good morning, Dr Watson," Mycroft smiled thinly. He cast his gaze briefly over what he could see of the flat from their position at the door. "I'm here to see my brother. I believe he is in his bedroom?" He walked past the doctor, practically pushing him out of the way as he did so, and headed round the corner to the door that held his interest.

"Hey-" John began, but Anthea lowered her phone so that she could cut him off.

"John," she said, effectively drawing his attention, "just leave it."

For a moment, the doctor did not reply. His eyes flicked briefly to the side of her neck, where a white bandage had been applied. Out of the bottom of his sleeve, Anthea could see a similar bandage had been placed on his wrist.

Ever since John had become Sherlock's volens, he and Anthea had become closer, connected by having vampires regularly sink their fangs into their flesh. They met up for coffee sometimes, when they could both spare the time. At this point, she would consider him a friend. As a result, she had a kind of affinity with the doctor; she held his trust in such a way that he would listen to her during times such as these.

John sighed and stepped backwards, sitting back in his armchair to continue with whatever he had been doing before he had been interrupted by a knock at the door. Anthea stepped into the flat, closing the door behind her. She did not think that she would have enough time to strike up a meaningful conversation with the doctor – and besides, he was preoccupied enough for her task to be carried out with surprisingly minimal effort – nor to get anywhere in the new level of her game, so she wandered over to the bookshelf to peruse.

She had always been rather impressed by the collection of tomes that the detective and his flatmate had amassed. There were books on blood spatter patterns and anatomy; on poetry and computers. Each time she looked at that bookshelf, she could find no single theme running through the collection. She usually merely made a note of the titles of the books, looking for things that she hadn't seen before, if only to satisfy her curiosity at what similarities these two wildly different men could have that made them such good friends.

That day, she found her gaze caught by a book that had the word 'volens' in the title. She remembered Mycroft being astounded that Sherlock had bought John a book in order to explain the concept of volens to him; could it be that this was the book that had seemed to cause so much trouble all those months ago?

Anthea looked over her shoulder, to see that the doctor was preoccupied in his armchair. Quietly, she removed the book from the shelf and began to flick through the pages. She skim-read most of the paragraphs, not taking in the sentiment of the prose word-for-word but noticing that the general tone of the book was horrifically patronising, as though the writer was addressing a child.

She now understood why Mycroft had been so mortified when he had found out what his brother had done when he had acquired this book.

She almost had to hold back laughter at some parts, a smirk pulling painfully at the corners of her mouth at just how ridiculous it was – that was, until she found a certain phrase on page 28.

"… the bond can even force the vampire to fall in love with their volens."

The smile slipped from her face. She looked sharply to her right, down the short corridor that ran alongside the kitchen and ended with the closed door to Sherlock's bedroom. There were still angry voices spilling through the gaps between the door and the doorframe, and she estimated that she had just enough time to freak out before Mycroft re-emerged and they would have to leave. She twisted on her heel, noticing that John hadn't looked up at her, and was most likely oblivious to her panic.

Throwing the detective's bedroom door a look one last time to check that she did, indeed, have enough time to do this, she crossed the room to the doctor's armchair in four long strides; as her heels clattered across the floor of the flat, he looked up, his brow furrowed in confusion. His gaze dropped to the book in her hand, closed though the page with the offending phrase was bookmarked with her index finger.

"What's wrong?" he asked, looking up at her face once more. John Watson was an excellent liar, but no one was good enough when they were attempting to lie to her.

"What – is this?" she asked fiercely but quietly, so there was absolutely no chance of either of the brothers overhearing this conversation – which was almost certainly far more important than whatever the younger had done this time to annoy the elder. She held out the book for John to see, her index finger indicating the offending phrase. The doctor's gaze flicked to the few words next to her finger, before a scared expression seeped into his eyes and he looked back up at her, his Adam's apple bobbing slightly beneath the skin of his throat as he gulped nervously.

"Um…" he began, but Anthea was far too furious to afford him the opportunity of finishing.

"Is this true?" she asked, her voice shriller than she would have liked.

"Um…" the doctor repeated, and she could almost see the cogs working in his head to come up with a decent excuse. "It says it doesn't happen all of the time," he supplied, gesturing to the page that he was being presented with.

Anthea narrowed her eyes at him, and John sat back a little further in his chair, trying to move that little bit further away from her.

"Well-" he tried, but Anthea was quickly losing her patience.

"Is – it – true?" She thinned her lips into a severe line and placed her free hand on her hip. In her heels, she towered over his sitting form, even more than she did over his standing form in flats. They may have been getting closer over the past few weeks, but – as she did with all of her friends (and her boss) – she made sure to keep him that little bit scared of her; she never knew when such things might come in handy, and it definitely would in this situation.

He didn't answer for a moment, looking not at her but slightly off to the side, seemingly unable to meet her gaze.

"Yes," he admitted finally, sighing.

Anthea wasn't sure that there had ever been a time when she had been angrier. John had known all about this side-effect for months, and he had neglected to tell her. Why would he have done something like that? The only thing that she could think of as being a reason for him to omit this kind of information from their conversations was-

"Oh…" she drawled, lifting her hand from her hip and placing her palm on her forehead instead. The hand still holding the book out to John fell to her side, the tome slapping against the top of her leg. A resigned look crossed the doctor's face, and his gaze dropped to the floor, ashamed. "It happened to Mycroft, didn't it?"

John closed his eyes briefly, his grip on the arms of his armchair tightening until his knuckles turned white. When he had relaxed, his grip loose and his eyes open once more, he nodded. "Yeah. Yeah, it did."

Anthea sighed, lowering her hand from her head and looking to her right towards the door behind which her boss was still berating his brother. For all this time – for all the years – that she had been his volens, he had been falling prey to the side effects of the bond between them, and he hadn't even mentioned it?

"I'm gonna kill him," she said, turning back to John, who was wearing an expression of confused disbelief.

"Is that possible?" he asked, but Anthea ignored him.

"I am going to fucking kill him."

The doctor opened his mouth to protest against her violent intentions, but was stolen the opportunity to do so when the door to Sherlock's room opened. Anthea quickly turned on her heel, replacing the book on the bookshelf and whipping her phone out from her pocket in one smooth movement, turning her back on the bookshelf and pretending to be busy. John also quickly returned to his previous occupation, and they both silently hoped that – when Mycroft emerged – he wouldn't notice that anything had changed between the two of them since he had left them alone together.

Thankfully, he appeared far too annoyed to be concerned with the conversation that had occurred in the living room in his absence. He gave John a brief and rather curt farewell before heading for the door to the staircase, gesturing for Anthea to follow him. The PA waved briefly at the doctor from the door, who smiled briefly as they left. Sherlock remained in his room, presumably fuming.

Anthea tried to keep the information that she had gained that morning in the back of her mind – for it would never do for the welfare of the country if she were to allow herself to be distracted. At first, it had been relatively easy – they had two more appointments before lunch, and they hadn't left 221b until nine, which didn't leave quite enough time to get everything done, and if there was anything to keep her focused on what she was doing rather than a distraction that had presented itself, it was having to rush around London while quite possibly asking Roger to break several traffic laws.

Lunch was late, and it was during those quiet moments that they had to eat that she was horribly reminded of that sentence, and the revelation that John had given her (however reluctantly the information had been extracted from him). By the time that they finally finished their morning errands – which weren't done until half past two – Mycroft was looking a little pale, a little wan: a little hungry. Anthea had never been so overjoyed to learn that he had blood bags. She wasn't sure she could deal with being his volens knowing what she knew now.

How long had this been going on for? The book seemed to suggest that the effect only begun once the bond had been created – but how soon after the bond had been created? Had this been happening for the best part of five years, ever since that awful night when she had been forced to remove that terrible bullet from his abdomen? She could sometimes still hear his cries of pain, when the outside world got too quiet.

Or had it been more recently; had they lived as vampire and volens comfortably for months, even years, before the bond had reared its nasty head and suddenly these feelings began to develop?

Yet as she absent-mindedly munched on her boring sandwich in the ten or fifteen minutes that they had to eat before they had to get on with their afternoon duties, she thought about what she was really frustrated about, and realised that it was not that this had happened at all – though she sympathised with having such feelings being imposed on one, sometimes when they were unwanted; rather, it was that he had chosen to hide it from her. She knew how painful it was to be so close to someone one felt so strongly about and for them to have absolutely no idea, and she hated the thought of Mycroft having to go through that.

Especially because, despite everything – despite being one of the most intelligent people she had ever known, far more intelligent than his brother – he was so ridiculously stupid sometimes. It was this one piece of knowledge that gave her the courage to confront him later that evening.

They got back to the office at around five o' clock, fighting their way through a vast crowd of people filling up the pavement as they tried to go in the opposite direction: towards train stations and bus stops that the two of them were heading away from. She thought about envying them all, that they got to go home at a relatively reasonable hour and she had at least another two hours in the office to look forward to; but even though she thought about it, she could never turn those thoughts into a reality. Maybe she just liked her job – maybe she was lucky that way.

They broke off into their separate offices when they reached their floor, unable to see each other through the panes of one-way glass that separated them. She settled down to work, but – at least for her – it was not what she could describe as a productive evening. Her brain was far too focused on the distraction that had presented itself.

What would she say? How would he react? She ran over scenario after scenario through her head, but – and maybe it was just her pessimistic outlook; her job-required tendency to always consider the worst possible outcome – she could not see one single way that this could end well at all.

When the clock on the wall of her office read eight o' clock and she decided that it was far better to just get this over with as quickly as possible than to dwell any longer on the thoughts of the possibility that this might end up going horribly wrong for either one or for both of them, she leapt up from her seat, crossed the corridor outside of her office, and knocked on Mycroft's door.

"Come in," he called, and she found herself surprised that there was no underlying tone to his voice, no indication that he had any idea as to what had been playing on her mind since they had left Baker Street that morning. She found it rather difficult to believe that her distraction had escaped his notice.

Nevertheless, she pushed open the glass door to the office and walked inside, her nervousness rolling like waves through her veins. She turned her back on him as she closed the door again, delaying the moment when her eyes would fall on him for fear that she would lose her ability to articulate her concerns if she was actually looking at him. With her hands still on the door handle and her back to her boss, she took a deep, steadying breath, and turned around.

One of the first things that she had ever noticed about Mycroft Holmes was that he always sat perfectly straight. She had never met anyone with such impeccable posture before – that was, until she met Sherlock, though he often slouched when in her presence, for usually when he was in her presence he was also in the presence of his brother, who abhorred when the detective sat in such a careless position. A perfectly straight back was always somehow the perfect way to make one just that little bit more intimidating and – though that was almost undoubtedly not his intention this evening – Anthea couldn't but feeling just that little bit more nervous at the sight of it.

Yet his brow was furrowed in confusion, his expensive fountain pen hanging limply between his long fingers as he had been interrupted during writing something. Anthea considered feeling guilty about that, for although he had invited her in, she was beginning to wonder if he would ever really deny her entry to his office if she knocked – for he always seemed to know when it was her.

"What is it?" he asked, his voice smooth and calm.

Anthea gulped nervously, clasping her hands behind her back for lack of anything else to do with them and taking a step forward.

"Sir…" she began, cursing herself internally for not preparing more thoroughly, "when we visited your brother and his flatmate this morning, I discovered… a book, while you were berating Sherlock."

Mycroft slowly lowered the pen in his hand onto the desk, taking a very long time to straighten the papers before him and make sure that the pen ran parallel to the side of the pages. He placed his elbows on the table and clasped his fingers together, holding them a few inches from his face.

"What book was it?"

"It was… a book on volens."

Mycroft sighed. "The same book that I mentioned to you when my brother was first considering acquiring a volens?"

"I think so," she answered. He opened his mouth to retaliate, but she cut him off. "I know you said it was ridiculous, but I spoke to John afterwards-" She stopped abruptly when his expression changed; no longer one of thinly veiled irritation but one which had a deep-seated anger within it: the same kind of anger that was present within him when someone had found out something that they really didn't need to know.

A silence descended over the two of them, as he realised exactly what it was that Anthea had found out that morning. Mycroft slid his elbows along the table until his palms lay flat on the surface, fingers still interlocked. He was suddenly transfixed by the ring on his right hand, playing with it idly, almost absent-mindedly.

When it became clear that he wasn't going to say anything else at this point, she asked quietly, "Is it true?"

For a moment, he said nothing. She was still left in doubt as to whether or not he had heard her at all, until he sighed, lifting his hand to pinch the bridge of his nose as he squeezed his eyes shut tight, then lowered his hand to gesture at the chair in front of his desk. Anthea walked forward, awkwardly taking the seat which was being offered to her and wincing slightly at how loud the creaks of the swivel mechanism underneath the seat of the chair were in the relative quiet of the office.

It was another moment before Mycroft looked back up at her. "When Sherlock was considering taking my advice about making Dr Watson his volens, we took him to the other office," he began, pausing when he was finished as if to ask Anthea in silence if she remembered that event; she nodded in response, and he continued. "While we were conversing, he asked me about that particular side effect, which he had read about in the same book in which you discovered it. He asked me if he thought that there was any way that Sherlock might fall prey to it; I told him that there wasn't, but I didn't tell him why."

Mycroft shifted slightly, leaning back a little in his chair. "I didn't tell him, because he had already worked out that I myself had fallen prey to the side effect, and so to disclose the reason why I knew that Sherlock would be immune would be to reveal more about myself to him than I had even revealed to you."

Anthea's brow furrowed slightly, unable to hold back a little bite of hurt at what he had just said. "You revealed your biggest secret to me a mere month after I had started working for you," she murmured. "I thought you didn't keep any secrets from me."

Mycroft smiled slightly, his gaze dropping to the desk between them. "There is only one," he told her, before lifting his gaze once more, "and that is that Sherlock would not have fallen prey to the side effect, because it cannot work from scratch. Feelings and emotions cannot be created by something external to the individual; they are far too personal, especially when it comes to such feelings as we are discussing."

Anthea took a deep breath, knowing exactly where this was going but unable to believe it; she needed to hear it from his lips. "Are you saying…" she muttered, trailing off and inviting him to finish.

"I am saying that the bond can only strengthen feelings that were already there; it cannot make someone fall in love with someone, if they were not already falling."

Anthea did not react straight away; she merely sat there, the words that she had just heard going back and forth through her mind.

After a moment passed between them in silence, she began to laugh. Mycroft's brow creased once more.

"Wh-" he began, but she interrupted him.

"You… are an idiot." It was rather amusing to see the smartest man she knew looking so incredibly confused. She stood up from the chair, leaning over the desk between them, grabbed the lapels of his ridiculously expensive suit, and pulled herself down to his level, crashing her lips against his. He made a strange noise of surprise, and, when she pulled back, the same shock was visible in his expression.

"Oh," he said simply, rendered somewhat speechless.

"Idiot," she breathed, kissing him again.