Author's Note: I'm sorry that the chapters are so short. I (honestly) have a visual impairment which makes it very difficult for me to write for long periods of time. There will be just as much story, but it will come in smaller chunks, so that I can use the time that I have to both write and edit one chapter before I submit it.

Also, thank you to euphoracle for the review! As Sherlock Holmes says here, ask, and perhaps you shall receive!

Chapter Two: A Meeting of Malice

Much to my chagrin, Sherlock Holmes was in no better a mood by the time we set out on foot for the Diogenes Club the next afternoon. He tramped along beside me in silence, deaf, apparently, to all of my coaxing comments about the weather or the latest sensational headlines in the papers.

The only time Holmes ventured to make any really invested comment was when I made the mistake of speculating about Miss Fairchild herself, the woman whom my friend was convinced had designs on his brother, and perhaps the other way around as well.

"She must be quote the rare intellectual," I pondered aloud, "to have captured Mycroft Holmes' attentions enough for him to ask you to meet her. Undoubtedly she's a formidable conversationalist, at least."

"On the contrary," brooded Holmes, never taking his eyes off of the pavement on which we walked. "My croft, as I have said before, and as you should well know, is hardly a man who enjoys such mental stimulation as much as I do. She's just as likely to be a taciturn toy of a girl, subjected to listening to his every speculation, however complex or correct, without giving him any reason to move from his chair."

"And yet, he'd never entertain the idea of keeping such a woman, or taking her to wife," I interjected.

Holmes shrugged diffidently. "We shall see," was all he said, before lapsing into another of his impenetrable silences.

Rather than succumb to his gloom, I attempted to rise above it and to amuse myself with my own thoughts for some time as we walked. I shortly found myself, however, having exhausted the interest I had maintained in the enigmatic Miss Fairchild, and I had nothing to do but to continue my attempts to engage Holmes in conversation, and to endure his sour-toned commentary.

It was with some disgust, and a great deal of relief, then, that I found us having reached the Diogenes Club. Upon entering the building, Holmes made a few quiet inquiries, and was soon directed to the spot where brother Mycroft was seated, awaiting our arrival.

He greeted me cordially enough, when he spotted us, and received Holmes with an effusion of pleasure that I had not believed Sherlock Holmes' brother capable of.

"I am very glad to see you," he kept saying, ringing my companions hand even as he tried to keep his voice down so as not to disturb the other club patrons. "Really, I am just delighted to see you, my dear Sherlock, and yourself, Doctor Watson, what a pleasurable surprise."

"The feeling is mutual, I assure you," I replied, smiling at being so enthusiastically welcomed. Holmes, on the other hand, said nothing at all, but relaxed some of his cold demeanor at Mycroft's obvious delight.

"Honestly," Mycroft was saying, as we abandoned the club and headed across the street to Mycroft's own nearby rooms. "I believed you wouldn't come. As I had no response from you by noon today, I was quite sure you'd decided that it wasn't in your best interests to show at all."

"I had," returned Holmes, with a little shrug, as we ascended a set of stairs outside Mycroft's Pall Mall home.

Mycroft, somewhat to my surprise, chuckled at this rather nasty remark. "I thought as much," he said, opening the door, and showing us in with a gesturing, gentlemanly hand.

"It was the good doctor," Holmes continued, taking an un-offered seat at Mycroft's table, "who took your part in the business. I have difficulty refusing any earnest request of Doctor Watson's, considering the numerous times I have dragged him out of bed at night to join me on the chase."

Mycroft said nothing, but only smiled approvingly at me. I recognized in Holmes statement the same logic that I had used the previous night to convince him of the necessity of answering his brother's call. I allowed myself a moment of pride that the great logician should use my very words.

"May I over you a cigar?" My croft asked, glancing between Holmes and myself as if desperate to get past the formalities of our visit. Noticing this urgency, I declined, but Holmes took some calculated time in selecting and lighting his own.

After having taken sufficient pains to be as politely generous with time as he could, Mycroft Holmes observed that his brother and myself were quite comfortably settled in. Practically swaying on his feet in his uncharacteristic eagerness, he leaned in towards Sherlock Holmes.

"If you 'd just wait right here," said Mycroft, regaining his composure as best he could in the face of Sherlock's obvious disapprobation, "I'll go fetch the lady in question downstairs for you."

With one last securing glance in our direction, then, he started up the stairs, until he was out of view of Holmes and myself. We could hear him tramping around his bedroom, his footfalls heavy with his significant bulk. A woman's voice answered him when he called, and Sherlock Holmes sighed resignedly, readjusting his long legs in the chair as he watched the stairs expectantly.

"You know, Watson," he reflected, between puffs of his cigar, turning to face me, "I don't believe I've ever seen my brother so excited, so…discommoded in my life."

"Perhaps," I suggested, "Your life could use something of the same."

Holmes shook his head, again with one of his queer philosopher's smiles.

"No, Watson, for all of your suggestions and implications, I do not believe that any woman could make me happy." He paused, and listened for a moment to the conversation that could still be heard from the room above. "I don't actually think," he continued after a moment, "that I shall ever be a really happy man at all."

Somewhat shocked, I narrowed my eyes at this grandiose statement. "What a ghastly thing to say," I replied and left it at that, turning away from him.

Holmes shook his head and smiled arrestingly. "I'm terribly sorry to have disturbed you," he said, nodding apologetically at me. "All I meant by that was that a happy man is a satisfied man, and a satisfied man is a complacent one." He paused, and shrugged his shoulders. "One thing I shall never be, Watson," he finished, "is a complacent man."

I puzzled over this peculiar statement for several minutes, watching Holmes drumming his fingers impatiently against the arms of his chair. I couldn't fathom the idea that happiness, or therefore the fulfillment that I had once felt myself to have obtained in my own life, would be so little desired in any man's eyes.

It was at that moment that Mycroft Holmes appeared again in the doorway. Standing as proudly erect as he could, he stepped a little aside to allow entrance to a woman, seemingly a tiny creature when dwarfed by his own significant person.

She was pale, wiry, and slim, with small, eager black eyes, and an abundance of very curly black hair, hair which took up most of the space Mycroft had allowed for her.

She was wearing a long, attractively cut violent dress, and held in her right hand a hat, which, I thought, would have done wonders to take her wild locks, although she never once thought to put it on. She looked, in fact, to my more whimsical eye, quite a bit like a fairy from a child's bedtime story, trying to fit into a corner of modern England.

Mycroft shared a glance with the girl, and then beamed at the two of us.

"May I present," he announced, "Miss Anne Fairchild." He glanced back and forth between us for a moment, and then, apparently noticing the error in his introductions, turned back to Miss Fairchild. "And this," he continued to her, "is Doctor Watson, and my brother, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, of whom I've so oft spoken."

"Charmed, I'm sure," drawled Holmes from his chair. I rose to my feet, and inclined my head politely at the lady, who was still watching my companion with a disappointed expression on her face.

"Miss Fairchild," continued Mycroft, seemingly ignoring Sherlock Holmes' attitude towards the newcomer, "has agreed to become my wife."

Having expected this, after all the pomp and circumstance he had put us through about meeting her, I smiled in the friendliest and most welcoming fashion I could. "A pleasure to meet you," I said.

Miss Fairchild smiled hesitantly at me in turn, apparently appreciative of my cordial attempts. "And you, Doctor Watson," she said. "I've heard such stories. Mycroft obviously holds you in some very high esteem."

She then turned her gaze on my friend, and I thought I noticed a little sparkle of malice in her eye. "And of course " she continued, "the great Sherlock Holmes himself. Wait till I inform my mother of the fact that I've met you in person. Why, you're almost a household name."

There was something in her phrasing of the statement that gave it the appearance of praise, without being of at all genuinely complimentary. Seeing Holmes' grimace of surprise and the subsequent look of satisfaction in Miss Fairchild's eyes, I began to feel a bit less than welcoming towards her.

"Actually, my dear Sherlock," stated Mycroft abruptly, apparently feeling that it was time for a change of atmosphere, "I had been hoping to ask you about something that has been plaguing me since you sent me that cut out of the column of the paper last Tuesday."

Holmes' countenance brightened, and he tore his attention away from Miss Fairchild to his brother's entreating face. "Very good, then. Ask, and perhaps, you shall receive." He settled himself back into his chair as if awaiting Mycroft's narrative.

Mycroft opened his mouth to speak, and Sherlock started towards him, from where he had been sitting passively all this time. At this moment, however, Miss Fairchild leaned towards Mycroft, and pressed her dainty face up to his ear, whispering something hushed and hurried.

A look of doubt and consternation seized Mycroft's features, and he looked from the woman, to his brother, and then back again. Finally, with a little apologetic half-smile at Holmes and myself, he shook his head.

"Never mind," he said dismissively, "it is nothing."

My companion blinked. "Surely," he said, "having brought it up in the first place, you will wish to follow through with it."

Mycroft shrugged. "A better thought has convinced me not to trouble you after all," he said, and we could see plainly from his set and yet pleasant expression that neither pleas nor persuasions would budge him on the subject.

At this, Sherlock Holmes seethed, so much that his barely controlled outrage started to tinge his face a darker hue. It took him several minutes to regain himself, although he did do so, with some effort likely noticed only by myself who knew him best. He took a calculated breath, and turned his deeply frustrated gaze on me, at which point I decided it was just about time for us to go.

"I'm afraid that we really must be going," I said, with that goal in mind. I spoke as politely and innocently as I could. "We have got appointments and pressing meetings of our own to make and meet, you know, and I believe that there is a client now waiting for your brother at Baker Street." I glanced at my watch. "We really shouldn't keep him much longer, if we can. You'll forgive us, then, for rushing away?"

Mycroft, for a moment, looked almost as unhappy as his brother, but he nodded, smiled, and waved me towards the door, drawing Miss Fairchild to his side with his other arm.

My friend nodded curtly at his brother, and then strode from the room. I knew that he expected me to follow immediately, so, with one final encouraging smile at Miss Fairchild, I went after Holmes into the deepening afternoon.

"Well," he said, with a little rueful laugh as I joined him on the front steps, "I suppose you will be forced to admit that I was right again, Watson. I have derived no enjoyment from the affair."

For myself, I really had nothing to say of the matter, so offended was I by the attitude that Holmes had taken with his brother and Miss Fairchild. I could not decide whether or not I was more disgusted with the way he had treated the lady, or more sympathetic for my friend, who I could now see was dejected at having lost his formerly insistently analytical brother taken away from him by this controlling woman.

It was perhaps a lucky accident, then, that at that very moment, a blood-curdling scream went up from the rooms just adjacent to Mycroft's own.

"Fire! Fire!" came the cry. Holmes raised an eyebrow, and gave me the most disturbingly elated glance, before rushing off in the direction of the cry.

"Come along, Watson," he called behind him as he went. "There's something dangerous afoot here after all! Perhaps, upon reflection, we shall discover that both of us were in the right."