Author's note: Posted entirely for the delight of The Guitar Person and their lovely review on the previous piece. This is written in one sitting as the previous part, and no, it isn't a good way to do things, but I've given up on doing things in a sane way. Hope you enjoy.
I.
Mycroft wages his way out into the drizzle to navigate his way through London in the back of his car with Anthea glued to her Blackberry, updating him on the state of the world as far as he's concerned about it. He hates meetings outside of his own building or its immediate vicinity, because traffic's a bloody nightmare and he's got no patience to be stuck between a cab and a hybrid Toyota.
"Sir, did you need me to contact anyone at Kingsman for further discussions?" she asks him and they've moved on from the whole world to his calendar, which he is certain is worse to navigate than London traffic, and yet Anthea does it without a hitch. On another day he may yet again entertain the thought of cloning his PA and let her do everyone's job he comes in contact with, because he's quite fed up with the idiotic populace. But today she reminds him of Kingsman, an episode he wouldn't mind to erase from his mind, and he sighs internally.
"I don't think that is necessary. The new Arthur seems capable of fulfilling his tasks in an adequate way." And Mycroft thanks the heavens he does not believe in for having one less thing to interfere with, but that doesn't make the matter of Harry Hart disappear anywhere. The problem there, he tells himself, lies in the fact that the man's invite was an open ended one, and Mycroft doesn't know what he wants.
This isn't straightforward politics, where he has an aim and a weapon, a quicksilver tongue to cut his colleagues with. This isn't being asked out in high school on a torn out notebook page he could stuck into a little shoebox at the back of his closet, where he stashes all of his denied sentimentality. This is preparing a cup of tea from a brand new blend with no idea of what it is and Mycroft does not like risks, despite enjoying games.
Harry Hart wants him to leave the safety of his office with his tea and his power lingering everywhere in the air as a safety net. Mycroft also tells himself it wasn't an explicit request for Mycroft to come out into the daylight, more like a proposition, and he doesn't do those.
The car suddenly pulls to a halt and a few cars ahead someone honks angrily that sets off a bustle of honks and profanities in the surrounding cars. The Toyota next to them joins the mismatched orchestra and the young man in the run down Saab right in front of them loses his temper. Mycroft watches evenly through his tinted windows as the kid gets out to yell 'you have a fucking problem, mate?' at the eco-friendly offender next to them.
"People used to have manners," Anthea says without sparing the scene a glance.
"Manners maketh man," Mycroft echoes automatically and wonders where he's heard that before.
II.
For some reason he receives unexpected company two days later right before tea time and Mycroft's heart speeds up for all of the two seconds before Anthea announces it's his brother. The only think Mycroft feels at that point is annoyance, because his brother never seeks him out, unless he's looking for a favour Mycroft isn't willing to grant. He's hungry and his brother is on the verge of a sulk; Mycroft can see as soon as Sherlock storms into the room with a scowl etched between his eyebrows.
He packs as much pointed sarcasm into his words as he can, when he asks, "Sherlock, what do I owe the pleasure?"
The git huffs in annoyance, coat swishing about as though he were still out in the wind and it's not natural. "Don't be daft. It doesn't suit you. You know exactly what you did." Sherlock folds his long limbs into Mycroft's chair and the scowl makes no sign of disappearing any time soon.
"Yes, I cancelled your online order of eighty live mice. It's not like you needed them."
"They were for an experiment," Sherlock grits and if his voice was not a deep baritone, he would've passed for the same grumpy child he used to be back in Sussex.
"Eighty of them, really? You would've merely given poor Mrs Hudson a heart attack, when they would have eventually set themselves free or resorted to cannibalism after your neglect to feed them."
"I wouldn't-"
His brother stops short as Anthea pushes into the room unannounced to serve tea and shortbreads. Mycroft rather suspects it's her way of trying to fuse his tea break and a fight with Sherlock together to conserve time, and he might even appreciate it, if it weren't for Sherlock poking fun at his eating habits. Nonetheless it forces them to sit down properly, face to face as Mycroft pours Darjeeling into the ugliest china he keeps at the office. Sherlock is after all prone to throw things about.
"Order a reasonable amount of rodents next time and I might even let you keep them," Mycroft says into his tea cup.
"Don't butt into my life next time, or any time for that matter," Sherlock tells him and the lines on his forehead are evening out against his will, "I'm not a child and you aren't God, despite what you might think."
"You make me sound delusional."
"You are."
Mycroft groans, but Sherlock isn't done yet, so he spits, "How's the diet?"
"How is John Watson?"
And Sherlock mad now. Proper mad as he gets up and looks at Mycroft with vitriol conjuring itself somewhere in back of his mind. Sherlock tells him to sod off and it remains at that, although he does accidentally chip his tea cup before he storms out of the office and Mycroft finally reaches for a shortbread.
He texts his brother 'You can have twenty. -MH' and gets ready for his five o'clock appointment.
III.
Baker street gets an exterminator not even two weeks later, and Mycroft is reminded that twenty mice in his brother's care during a case that warrants a 'Wonderful!' was a terrible idea. He reads all about the rodent infestation on a slow day in the office. It's rather surprising there's no immediate threat to the country by some villain with a lot of money and a badly executed vision of world domination. To the point even, where he's almost tempted to call MI6 and check they are doing their job. He does not.
Instead he decides to head out just after London's general lunchtime to see if perhaps he'd have the time to buy a new suit this afternoon.
The streets are bearably crowded in way that doesn't make him claustrophobic, but Mycroft is still relieved to enter his tailor's shop that's empty and laid out as if it had been waiting for him all along. He takes instant comfort in the familiar fabrics and shiny, polished wood panels with rows of suits and ties and shoes arranged meticulously. He gets his measurements taken and orders a storm grey suit with a verdigris shirt to match it. Mycroft thinks about his purchase as he walks out the door and down Savile Row, until he spots sodding Harry Hart in the Kingsman shop window, tying a wooden mannequin's tie.
He's free to gape for a moment before pulling himself together again and he's still debating whether to keep on walking or head over when Harry Hart turns around and they make eye contact. Well, there's no escaping it now, he thinks and crosses the street with a quick look down both ends.
By the time Mycroft enters the shop with a little bell sounding above his head, Harry Hart's clambered back into the shop without a crease on his suit or a hair out of place. "May I help you somehow, Mr Holmes?" he asks and the other clerk, who'd been about to approach them made a hasty retreat into the back room.
"Yes, I thought I'd pop by," Mycroft says and it sounds strange out of his mouth, "Quiet day at the office and all that; figured I might buy… a tie."
It's definitely on the side of a lame opening line, but at least he's made it all the way over here and Harry hart doesn't seem the least bit bothered, when he says, "Right, the ties are over here, next to the waistcoats, in case you'd want to get one of those too. Lavender might be a good match for your current suit."
Mycroft is reminded of the comment that suggested this meeting in the first place, but doesn't mention it. He merely trails after Hart and stares at a selection of silky fabric slips, both plain and intricately patterned. At the end he points to a striped one and Harry Hart unravels the sample for him to touch. Their fingers brush as the tie is passed over and Mycroft thinks himself stupid for being more caught up in the fraction of a second than the thing he's supposed to be buying.
"So?"
"I'll take it."
"Anything else? Cufflinks, waistcoat? Umbrella perhaps?"
Mycroft half expects him to ask 'Coffee tomorrow?', but it never comes. "Not this time I think. I'll get a new suit soon. Perhaps I shall come look for something appropriate then." And that's just about as much as he's willing to offer. It's not a promise, but it's not exactly not one either.
Harry Hart rings up his purchase and Mycroft pays for it with a nameless black credit card that makes the other man smirk mischievously. Mycroft makes a point of staring into the distance as Hart gets him a brand new tie in a little black box and packs it all neatly into a bag. It occurs to him to text for a car, because it's raining again and he isn't walking.
"Thank you, Mr Holmes," Harry Hart says and hands the tie in the bag over the counter, "I hope to see you at Kingsman again soon."
And Mycroft's convinced there's nothing much to today's exchange, except that Harry bloody Hart decides to wink at him at that moment and he has to rush out of the door to hide the blush that's creeping up his neck.
"Sodding genetics," Mycroft mumbles to himself as he climbs into the back of his car and disappears in traffic. He peeks into the bag with a perfect box lying at the bottom and a receipt tucked in next to it. When he unfolds it, he discovers a phone number written on the back with the words 'if you ever want to have tea somewhere else than your office'. He swallows once and tucks the paper back into the bag. If it hadn't been for the former Arthur, he wouldn't be in this mess now, he thinks bitterly, even as his eidetic memory is filing Harry Hart's number for future use.
IV.
They go on a date of sorts. It's just tea, but it's on neutral ground, meeting up in front of Vauxhall after Mycroft's discussion with M on foreign politics. It's raining in typical London fashion and is about to open his umbrella instinctively, when Harry Hart holds his own over them both. Mycroft goes along with it, clutching his closed umbrella in one hand and his phone in the other. It's a bit clumsy in the way their shoulder's bump together and his right sleeve dampens from the rain, but he can't just huddle up under his own umbrella three feet over and start a conversation, yelling over the deluge.
"Where are we going?"
"Lovely little coffee shop a few blocks away," Hart mutters and Mycroft dignifies him with a first proper look. He's scanning the crowd like the well-trained spy he is, all the while avoiding little puddles forming in basins of crooked slabs. It's all as effortless as Mycroft's discussion about that little debacle in Indonesia back at Vauxhall and seeing that ease in someone else is a bit startling. "Excellent scones there. I found it once, when I came back from Prague with a broken nose and needed some instant comfort tea after a debrief and a half-rushed escape from medical," Harry Hart casts a glance at him, "I'm not very fond of hospitals, as you could probably imagine."
"Does anyone actually like hospitals?"
Hart shrugs, which has a few static droplets fall off the edges of their shared umbrella. Mycroft goes on to say, "I understand some people have a special kind of opposition towards medical facilities though. If you're anything like my brother, and I rather hope you are not."
"Git?"
"A bit."
"Haven't met him."
"Oh, I bet you've seen his face plastered on the front of a tabloid," Mycroft snorts, because the work he and Harry Hart do is all hush hush and behind the scenes, while Sherlock runs about with the press snapping photos every here and there after memorable cases.
"If he's been on the cover of the Sun, I might've even."
Harry Hart grins at him in a rather ridiculous manner and Mycroft gets the sensation there's more to this than he's letting on. An inside joke Mycroft wants to dissect and lay open on the table, understand it and use it to make his kind-of-date smile like that again.
They end up in a truly miniscule café, two tables with antique chairs squeezes into a cosy locale. Mycroft orders Lychee tea and two scones to make up for a missed lunch and lets himself relax into his chair.
"How is life out of service?"
"Bit dull of course, but Eggsy is so fond of telling me about all his adventures as Galahad, I wouldn't want the job back. Let someone else save the world for a change."
"I wish I had that leverage."
"You're out having tea with me, aren't you?" Harry Hart says, "Someone's keeping the rows in order in the meantime."
"The last time I left the office, Ukraine happened." He tries to make a point with a firm stare, but he ends up sort of smiling anyway, because it's a sort of date and he's not taken the afternoon off for nothing.
Harry Hart laughs heartily and Mycroft's smile widens a little more. He might even consider it nice, when their orders arrive and he gets half a scone into his rumbling belly with the rain pattering against the windows and London life bustling about beyond it. They drink tea, with their legs touching under the table and it's the strangest thing Mycroft's done in a while.
"Good?" Harry Hart asks eventually, when the silence goes from comfortable to elongated.
"Delightful. Do you do this often?"
"Drag dishy men in three piece suits, who may or may not run half the country, out for tea after having sold them a tie I am certain they could tie into a Trinity knot or use as a murder weapon?" Harry Hart asks all in a single, everlasting breath. "No, not very often. Might be a first actually."
"For the record, I wouldn't mind, if North Korea went bonkers while I'm here."
"In that case I'd consider this a successful date, even without flowers."
And Mycroft's caught in a nervous chuckle from the fact that it is a date, and he may or may not be dating one of the most deadly men in the imperium. "Flowers mightn't have worked too well anyway. I am afraid my genetics have blessed me with a pollen allergy or two."
"We can't all be perfect."
Mycroft would say something about one of Harry's toes, once broken and set wrong, but then he'd have to admit to perhaps having read his file in depth. "I believe that should be 'none of us'. Though, I think my not perfect herd of employees is calling for me. Wouldn't want the world to implode, while we're having a chat over tea and scones."
"And here I thought," Harry Hart says, even as he's already getting up, "I was interesting. Do the matching patterns of wet sleeves on our suits mean nothing to you, Mycroft."
It's sarcastic and playful, something Mycroft can't quite remember how to do, so he just swats at Harry Hart's arm. That's how his wrist ends up enclosed in a hand and he's being led out to the street to stand under Harry Hart's umbrella in the rain like they're in a terrible romcom.
"I may not have flowers," Harry Hart says, "but I did bring a little something with me."
He fishes a little bag out of his breast pocket, something distinctly Kingsman. Mycroft arches an eyebrow at him, but dutifully fishes two little buds out of it. They are the telluric cufflinks that supposedly match his eyes and Mycroft looks at them for a long while. "Thank you. They are gorgeous."
"The faith you've placed in me is truly overwhelming," Hart mutters with sarcasm dripping from the statement and Mycroft could swear the glint in his eye is affection. They grin at each other like the madmen they are and for a very brief moment Mycroft Holmes is convinced Harry Hart is going to kiss him on the cheek.
"I like you, Mycroft Holmes," he says and that's even a bit more old school sweet.
"You're quite interesting yourself, Harry Hart."
And he's not mistaken about the peck on the cheek. It's brief, a touch of warmth and the edge of spectacles digging into his temple. It's as subtle as their respective influences on the world as seen by the public and that's just the way Mycroft prefers it, if he's honest with himself.
V.
He doesn't see Harry Hart in a week and a half. No texts, no phone calls, no cards, or flowers, or unexpected visits for tea. Mycroft is busy reviewing all the possible outcomes for the upcoming elections and his plan of action for each of those.
He works them into a handwritten spreadsheet, wallpaper in his mind palace. In the midst of it he doesn't have time to mind the radio silence, doesn't even properly remember, until Anthea calls him about the new suit at his tailor's.
"I'll pick it up myself," he tells her and finds himself thinking of waistcoats and Harry Hart's glasses against his skin. Mycroft rubs at his face; he hasn't slept properly all week and he's not going cross eyed yet, but it's not far away. His contacts scratch unpleasantly and he decides he might take a break now just as well as later on.
While Anthea gets him the car, Mycroft washes his face and changes his contacts to something cooler, less irritating and wills the bloodshot look to go away by the time he gets to Kingsman.
When they do actually pull up in front of the Kingsman shop, Mycroft is ready to doze off in the back of the car for half an eternity, but he's got a little bit lovesickness to cure. He forces himself out of the car, sends the driver to collect his suit as he makes a dash through the rain into the Kingsman boutique.
Harry Hart stands behind the counter, scribbling into a notebook in blue ink fountain pen, an endearing crease forming on his forehead as he's absorbed in the task. Mycroft realises belatedly he's been caught out staring after the tinkle of the bell brings Hart's attention to the man standing in his shop.
"Mycroft-"
"I came to look for that waistcoat," he blurts and the expression on Harry Hart's face is growing strange.
"Certain about that? You look rather more like you either need a kip on the couch or a cup of tea."
"Ugh, that sounds much better indeed."
He doesn't care too much, when he's gently being led towards the back of the store and up the stairs. Mycroft clutches the railing with one hand and Harry Hart with the other. "You can't just leave the store unattended."
"Patrick is in the back. He'll take over."
They sit in the drawing room, Mycroft melting into a leather sofa as Harry Hart makes tea and there's that silence from the coffee shop again. It takes a short five minutes for two steaming cups of Earl Grey to materialize on the table. Harry Hart sits down next to him with a three inch breathing space between them.
"Why are you so nice to me?" Mycroft asks with fragile honesty, thinking of the ice-cold or hate filled relationships he has with everyone else.
"Because you are a gentleman. Gentlemen deserve to be treated with respect."
"And you said liked me."
"And I like you still."
"I like you too," Mycroft confesses and Harry Hart stares at him with that almost affectionate look in his eyes. He's about to kiss Mycroft on the forehead, or somewhere equally chaste and absurd, so Mycroft grabs him by his tie and tugs.
It's a little bit choking, and definitely tie-wrinkling, not that Mycroft has the ability to care, because Mycroft Holmes kisses Harry Hart for the first time on the brink of exhaustion over a cup of Earl Grey. When he lets go, he's certain his pupils are blown wide like Harry's and the flush is already well past his collar.
"Now what?"
"We drink tea."