Disclaimer: Still not mine.


Christmas Day, 2005

The man doesn't appear the year after that unexpected gift and Mycroft realizes he will not resume the pattern that was broken, but rather continue it from now on.

(Jack will stubbornly maintain that there isn't a pattern. He visits Mycroft, he insists, when he feels like it and can manage his other duties around it. That it always happens on Christmas Day is just coincidence.

But Mycroft won't ever believe that because he doesn't believe in coincidences, period. The universe is rarely so lazy.)

Mycroft is still less than impressed with the choice of Christmas Day, but it is pleasant to have something to anticipate beyond Mummy's pudding, at least some of the time. Especially since in the intervening years, the festivities are mostly repetitions of the same elements over and over.

Mummy gushing over Sherlock's newest violin composition (his only concession to the practice of gift-giving), worrying about Mycroft's work hours (which is ridiculous, and really, burying his phone in Brussels sprouts to prevent him from working on Christmas Day is excessive) and trilling about their needing a girlfriend (utterly ludicrous) or grumbling about their smoking habits.

Sherlock himself bitching and moaning about boredom more than is reasonable to expect from a grown man, even one trapped in their parents' kitchen - unless some text from that incredibly useful Detective Inspector he eventually befriends catches his attention, at which point he'll switch to texting frantically and insulting the London MET from a distance.

(His brother has, at long last, found his way, or at least forged it, and while Mycroft isn't particularly happy with it – he worries, constantly – nor too impressed – to think he'd turn a childish game into a profession: typical Sherlock – he admits that it is, at least, better than the drugs, whose threat still looms over his brother's life, and if nothing else, Mycroft has enough authority to keep constant surveillance on him, which should lessen his chances of getting himself killed – albeit not for lack of trying on his part).

And Father expressing some rather distressing views on current politics (leaving Mycroft wondering wether he knows his parents at all – surely they were not always such Tories?) or talking for hours about acquaintances Mycroft barely remembers and never cared about (how does Sherlock always avoid these long-winded excruciatingly useless conversations? Mycroft needs to learn that trick) while sipping substandard brandy (despite the fact that Mycroft invariably brings a bottle of finer quality as a present) and generally making Mycroft regret not staying in the office with all of himself (although he knows he'll get guilt-tripped into visiting his parents again next year, work would be much preferable to this agony. How can a day last so long?)

Followed by a flurry of frantic activity once he can finally return to his office (his minions are good – he chose them himself after all – but they have an unavoidable propensity to defer to people of rank who for their part have the distressing tendency to turn into headless chickens if left to their own devices too long.)

In any case it is four years before he sees Jack Harkness again.

(In person, that is. Copies of the reports of the man's activity as Head of Torchwood Three appear on his desk with regularity, so he knows very well what Harkness is up to; and normally dryly written papers, poorly-shot pictures and uncertainly directed videos would be enough for Mycroft – he can get anything he might need from them and they do not require the wearying social construct of 'small talk' – but even so, it isn't really the same.)

By the time the right Christmas rolls around, Mycroft has worked his way up to unlimited clearance level, and got his hands on Harkness' personal file.

Most of it is redacted, of course, some of it is confusing and hardly believable, and he can tell even with just a superficial reading that some of it is deliberately misdirecting.

Mycroft isn't a genius for nothing however and he could piece together the truth from less than what he is given.

He pours the man a whiskey and cuts the triumphantly decadent chocolate cake Jack has brought (that is, Mycroft decides, the utmost pinnacle of chocolate-using patisserie and isn't it a pity manners demand that he shares it?) and he doesn't mean to, he really doesn't, but he ends up asking a question anyway. A single one. (He really can't help it – he still likes showing off.)

"What is it like?"

"What is what like?"

"Living forever."

Jack's easy smile vanishes. "Lonely."