A/N: Based off the following quotes from Sherlock episode 3x1:
"One of our men died getting this information…" -Anthea
"An agent gave his life to tell us that…" -Mycroft Holmes
Warnings: Miscarriage
Disclaimer: If I owned Sherlock, Sherlolly would be canon.
"You really shouldn't go," Mycroft muttered, flicking the paper to read the top corner of the right side.
Anthea -her real name was unknown even to himself, she really prefered "Anthea" anyhow- stood in front of the mirror above the vanity, "I've got to."
"You really shouldn't though. It's not safe."
"When have you normally cared?" He glanced up to find her smiling at him, in a way that said she'd won. She was the only one who could do that and get away with it.
"Your need to hear me say what you already know is infuriating." Anthea shrugged, "Because sentimentality is weakness?"
He didn't answer. She slid the ring on her right ring finger off, setting it on the polished wood. "Must you take it off?" She glanced at him, "I must, for my cover."
"I much prefer it when you have it on." Anthea smiled softly to herself, fixing the blouse and pencil skirt she wore. Her hair was in a tight bun, the whole ensemble needed for her undercover operation.
She stood up straight from fixing the bottom of her skirt to find him standing behind her and she smiled, turning to face him, "I'll be fine."
Mycroft remained frowning, hands clasped behind his back and shoulders tense. "Anthea-"
"Mycroft I've done things like this before."
"Yes but not in your, condition." Anthea's hands absently came to rest on the slight bump of her abdomen. Not enough to be noticeable, but still there. "And you say you don't care."
Mycroft scoffed, "Nonsense I can't have you risking the life of a future agent." Anthea pressed a kiss to his cheek, "Oh certainly. Wouldn't want someone to think you actually cared for your wife and unborn child."
She moved past him and slid on her shoes, turning to the door. "Anthea."
She turned to face him. "Please be careful." He hadn't moved, hadn't flinched, his tone hadn't even changed. But the look in his eyes told her how very much he did care for his wife and unborn child, and how very much he wished her to be careful. "I'll do nothing you wouldn't do."
"Anthea-"
"I promise."
"I know." The words went unspoken but she heard them just the same, smiling at him softly as she made to close the door, "I love you too."
It'd been going so well. She'd been within the upper ring of the terrorist group, or at least she'd been in the upper ring of those trusted spies. She'd gotten a good bit of information, plenty for Sherlock when Mycroft found him.
"Miss Scott I wonder if I could have a word in my office."
She stopped walking and turned to see her "boss" who was another spy, higher than her in rank. She nodded with a smile and followed him in his office, closing the door behind her.
She turned to find her "boss" and a man she'd never met. "What did you need?" The man pressed his fingers together, "Miss Rebecca Scott, that's your name is it?"
Her heart stopped. She'd been found out, she was certain. But she had to play ignorant, if she was going to get out alive. "It is, yes. Listen, I have some new information on-"
"No you don't."
"Pardon?"
"If it was 'new' it would mean you just learned it. However you have known the information quite some time and have only now been given the okay to tell us. You're a spy. And you know what we do with spies."
The other man had pulled a gun but in one swift movement he was incapacitated, lying unconscious on the ground. She swiped the gun and turned to her "boss." A searing pain shot through her lower abdomen and the world froze, moving slowly as she fired at him, watching him fall.
She let her hand fall to her side, gun hitting the floor as she slumped against the wall, pressing a hand to the wound on her abdomen. The pain was ten times worse than what it should have been and she knew why. She didn't want to think about it but she knew, deep down, the pain was psychological as well as physical.
By the time Mycroft came -which was about ten minutes- she had lost her calm demeanor and was sobbing, clutching her stomach with shaking hands. He knelt beside her as the two men were taken care of, "Shh, it's alright. It'll be alright."
She shook her head, tear-filled eyes locking with his. He gently picked her up and carried her out the door and down the hall, down the stairs to his car. The ride to their home was short, and a private doctor was ready and waiting.
Mycroft waited outside the room while the doctor tended to Anthea. She lay on the bed quietly while he told her what she already knew, told her that there was nothing she could have done, and it wasn't her fault.
Her tears had dried by that time, and she stared blankly ahead when Mycroft came to sit beside her after the doctor left. He took her hand in his and attempted to get her to look at him.
"We didn't even know if it was a boy or girl."
He swiped a piece of hair away from her face, "We didn't." She let a few more crystalline tears fall, her eyes still bloodshot from her previous crying, "I-I was a terrible mother before I was even a real one."
"Not inherently having the child does not mean you were not a real mother. You still felt the same protective instinct every mother feels when they find they're expecting. That does not change with the absence of the child."
Anthea buried her head in her hands, crying softly, "I should have listened to you! I thought-I thought-"
He gently wrapped her in a hug, pulling her to his chest, "It's not your fault."
Anthea sniffed, "How can you be so calm about this? It was your child t-too." Her voice broke and he held her tighter, "Because I am impassive externally, does not mean I am not broken internally."
She pulled away, looking up into his glassy eyes as a few tears managed to leak from them. She wrapped her arms around him and held tight, still crying silently. "I'm sorry."
"You have nothing to be sorry for. Never think otherwise." She smiled despite herself. Because although he put up a brave front, an uncaring facade, claimed sentimentality was a weakness, he really did care. He may not have shown it to anyone, but he did with her. Perhaps it was only her, and maybe Sherlock occasionally, but that was alright. When it counted, he was emotional, or as emotional as Mycroft was capable of.
Sometimes his brother's interest in trivial things -like whether the style of shirt he's currently wearing "looks good on him"- was astounding. As astounding as his disinterest in things that mattered. Like the loss of a life.
Anthea's comment of losing "one of their men" for the information provided to Sherlock did not go unnoticed by Mycroft. Her eyes flashed with pain momentarily as she said it, as well as anger.
Sherlock dismissed her comment in favor of finding out about his dear friend John Watson. Anthea shot Mycroft a look and he gave the tiniest of nods. They'd talk later.
Operation really was a children's game but took much more concentration than one would expect.
Sherlock finished his move and handed the tweezers to Mycroft who took them, glancing up as Sherlock replied to his last comment.
"Boring. Your move."
"We have solid information. An attack is coming." Sherlock scoffed slightly, fingers steepled in front of his chin, "'Solid information.' A secret terrorist organization's planning an attack – that's what secret terrorist organizations do, isn't it? It's their version of golf."
The words left Mycroft's mouth before he processed fully what he was saying:
"An agent gave his life to tell us that."
Perhaps it was wrong to refer to his unborn -and never to be born- child as an "agent" but he had no other way of putting it to himself. They knew not the gender, and he could not express his sorrow to Sherlock by saying "child." He would scoff, and that was not what Mycroft needed.
One would perhaps say it was sad that his own brother did not know of his marriage or of the death of his unborn niece or nephew, but the Holmes brothers were never ones of sentimentality, Mycroft less so than Sherlock.
Even without the word "child" used, Sherlock still scoffed, "Perhaps he shouldn't have done. He was obviously just trying to show off."
He felt his throat constrict and eyes grow glassy ever so slightly but he simply swallowed the pain. The urge to throttle his brother had never been so strong but he ignored the pain, shoved it down. Caring was a weakness. He was not weak.
He managed to forget his brother's harsh -unknowingly harsh- words while they bantered back and forth over a hat belonging to a well-travelled anxious sentimental unfit creature of habit with appalling halitosis and -according to Sherlock- isolated and lonely.
As to his brother's comment that he himself was lonely, that was far from the truth. If he kept up the farce that he was lonely well enough for his own brother to believe it, well then all the better. He had Anthea, who was the only reason he was eating at the moment, and he would have had their child.
One day it wouldn't hurt as much, he knew, to think about it. One day perhaps they'd look back and smile sadly, perhaps then look to a perfectly healthy child. If Mycroft was to indulge in foolish fantasies once in his entire life, he was glad it was of family.
For no matter how much of an "Ice-Man" persona he put up, he did care for some people, Sherlock surely, and his parents, and definitely Anthea. Caring was not always a disadvantage and sentimentality could sometimes be a good thing, but he'd never admit it out loud.
With an incline of his head and the clearing of his throat he bid Sherlock and Mrs. Hudson his brother's landlady good day, leaving through the front door to the waiting car.
Sherlock watched his brother go silently, turning back to the wall of information and muttering "back to work" under his breath.
His gaze flickered once more to the stairwell his brother had disappeared down. For however much Mycroft sometimes believed Sherlock to be an idiot, he observed more trivial things that did, in the end, matter.
Mycroft's PA -who he recently discovered was his brother's wife- was not really named Anthea, but that was common knowledge. The last time he'd seen her she'd been sullen and the time before that, before the terrorist information, she'd been glowing with something akin to happiness, a happiness only a woman who recently discovered she was expecting could have.
The last two times he'd seen his brother, it was mentioned that an agent had died getting the information needed. Anthea's voice had broken when she said it, Mycroft's eyes had gone glassy. His brother was not sentimental, nor was he incredibly caring over his subordinates so the mere fact that he had brought up the death of an "agent" was unique in itself. It did not take a genius, well not a complete genius, or maybe an averagely smart person with an advantage, to see that the titles of "agent" and "one of our own" referring to the deceased was closer to the latter than the former.
Mycroft could not bring himself to say "child" and he instead pacified himself with "agent." Sherlock clasped his hands behind his back, eyes staring at the wall but still unseeing. It was not the fact that he would not be an uncle, nor that he didn't know he would have been before it was too late. It was knowing his brother could not trust him to tell him this information without getting a jibe about "sentimentality" and "caring" back in his face.
And perhaps that was Sherlock's own fault. Always having prodded his brother at every available moment of weakness, but it was not as though Mycroft did not do the same! Still, if his brother were to mourn, he wished he was given enough trust to at least mourn with him. The Holmes' were not sentimental people but that didn't mean they did not care.
"Terribly sorry for your loss, brother. I only wish you would have told me."
"Did you say something Sherlock?" He half-turned towards Mrs. Hudson, "Hmm? Oh no."
"Could have sworn you did… Guess my hearing's going then! Do you want some tea?"
He turned back the wall, "That would be lovely." She bustled about the kitchen making some and he sighed quietly. This case was imperative to solve as soon as possible, and yet the knowledge that the life of not simply a stranger, but what would have been a family member was lost because of it… Well it certainly was a motivator if ever he had one.
Mycroft felt his phone vibrate and retracted it from his pocket to read the message.
To trust is not a disadvantage, brother.
I am sorry for your loss.
SH
Leave it to Sherlock to figure out exactly what was trying to be hidden from him.
I don't know what you mean, brother mine.
M
The reply was instantaneous.
Of course not.
My regards to your wife.
SH
Mycroft had to smile then. Knowing that what he'd tried to hide from his brother was still seen and that he was wrong in assuming otherwise would normally have irked him but it was always, despite never admitting it, nice to know someone cared. Even if that someone was your sociopathic, sometimes idiotic, unsocial, oblivious-to-the-obvious brother.
Thank you.
M
Sherlock smiled. Despite what it was his brother was really thanking him for, it went unspoken and that was perfectly fine. He tucked his phone in his robe pocket and went back to looking at the wall. His phone vibrated one more time and he pulled it out, frowning at the message. "You cheeky bastard."
My regards to your pathologist.
Mummy's beginning to worry.
She hasn't received a wedding invitation.
M
Mycroft smirked to himself as he tucked his phone away. His brother may care, but that didn't mean he couldn't take the piss out of him anyway. What was family for?