Mycroft heard a shuffling in the doorway, a visitor to the Diogenes guest room who knew the rules. He raised his gaze to silently greet the doctor, before moving through to the strangers room, knowing John was following.
"Did you count the four?" He asked, smiling slightly. John hoped the half hearted nature of his rather smug smile was because he was being insincere, rather than because the ugly bruising around his right eye and cheek, were too painful.
John blinked in confusion, before his expression cleared. The four counts on which he'd been wrong, according to Mycroft, seconds before he'd almost literally punched his lights out.
John struggled to remember exactly what he'd accused Mycroft of, in order to work out how many times he'd been wrong. He got to three, but couldn't quite work out what he'd missed. Mycroft hadn't betrayed Sherlock, one, he hadn't sold him out to a psychopath, two and as such, he hadn't let Sherlock betray the only people in the world who cared about him…three.
A wave of shame suddenly hit him as he realised.
"Didn't betray him, didn't sell him out to a psychopath, didn't let him betray the rest of us…" John mumbled, watching Mycroft warily. Mycroft raised an eyebrow at him. "…And we're not the only people who care about him."
The slight jut of Mycroft's chin in response to this, had to be the only time John had ever seen the elder Holmes being openly possessive of his brother. An utterly inappropriate urge to laugh welled up in his chest. Mycroft smirked at him as he tried to suppress his stuttering laughter.
"Point well made, Mycroft, I'm sorry I was out of order." John choked when he had his laughter under control.
"Indeed, but it's not your fault. I'd say your loyalty does you credit, but you really are going to have to stop punching people on behalf of my brother." Mycroft replied smoothly. John wasn't sure whether he was joking or not.
"You'd have killed Moriarty for him." John argued, without thinking.
Mycroft's expression darkened and all trace of humour disappeared from his face.
"As yet, I have found nothing that couldn't prefix the end of that statement, John. What I want to do and what has to be done, aren't always the same thing. You'd do well to remember it."
With that, Mycroft brushed passed the doctor into the main room, where he couldn't follow or at least, couldn't respond if he did follow. Mycroft no longer fancied the company of his silent fellow misanthropists, he continued out through the club doors and into his waiting car.
Once safely behind the tinted windows of his black Lexus, Mycroft buried his head in his hands and breathed deeply, trying to get his pounding heart under control. He had revisited the day he'd been dragged away from a blood spattered Moriarty many times, without John Watson's help. He'd never hated a human being, never been interested enough in one to bother hating any at all, like James Moriarty.
If everything he'd done, because of and in spite of Moriarty, had ever been undermined, it had to be by Sherlock's oblivious failure to inform John at least, his unofficial bodyguard, that his traitor's role had been a blind. He'd spoken the truth, when he told Sherlock he wasn't angry. He'd wanted to be, but as he'd said, he could forgive a simple oversight, it wasn't as though Sherlock had done it intentionally.
With the evidence that he had done it, whether intentionally or not, Mycroft felt suddenly lost. He'd thought when first Gregory Lestrade, then John Watson, entered Sherlock's life, that his role was getting harder to define. Lestrade got him clean, John kept him safe far more efficiently than Mycroft ever did. Good then, he could only think, Sherlock had found his way, albeit ten years later than most people's younger siblings did.
Mycroft had spent the many, many years since their youth, complaining bitterly about how much more difficult Sherlock somehow managed to make his life, and Sherlock's complaints to the reverse if anything, were even more consistent. Mycroft had to involve himself in Sherlock's life or else when he broke into top security Government facilities, he would just end up in jail, let alone be able to stroll back in a day later, fully authorised. War between them was, mostly, necessity.
Mycroft surely had no grounds to complain then, when it seemed their war was over.
