Relief, Revelation

Relief. Sherlock's fingers pressed in deeper, and Mycroft moaned: "Ohhh, Sherlock, this is perfect."

"I could tell you needed it," Sherlock murmured, concentrating on the spot he was working on.

"Where did you learn how to do this?" he sounded slightly strangled – in a blissful way – as Sherlock shifted his digits by half an inch.

"I've never tried it on a living person, but you know… I know bodies."

"You mapped out these points on corpses in the morgue?" Mycroft groaned into the pillow. "I doubt they gave you feedback."

"Corpses give plenty of feedback – the marks that show up after you've bruised, or cut, or flogged the… well, not the life out of them… but you get the picture," Sherlock explained as he applied more pressure. "That's why I have to handle dead bodies much more carefully than living ones."

Mycroft turned his head on the pillow to glare at Sherlock the best he could from his awkward position, saying a little stiffly: "So you're handling me more carelessly than you would a corpse."

"No, Mycroft. I'm being exquisitely careful with you," Sherlock replied with a seriousness and depth of tone that made Mycroft colour. "I mean that living bodies heal; corpses don't – they stay damaged. You're alive, and you're changing and healing. You'll heal."

If there weren't at least three layers of intended meaning to those last two words, Mycroft would be surprised.

But Sherlock was working on his lower back now, and he had the luxury of allowing his mind to go completely blank for a while as his brother kneaded the pads of his thumbs into a place that went to the core of the tension Mycroft had been feeling in his spine since Sherrinford.

"That's… ahhhhh…" Mycroft moaned again.

Sherlock chuckled as he made tiny circular movements with his thumbs over the area.

"I've observed a mild stiffness and imbalance in your hips and back for some weeks now," Sherlock said, sinking his thumbs into the flesh on either side of Mycroft's spine. "Your iliapsoas compound muscles mostly lie too deep to access directly, but this is where they meet your vertebrae, from the twelfth thoracic to the fifth lumbar. It's a good spot for stimulating them to relieve the discomfort they may be causing."

"Some days, it feels as if my back will snap and slide off to the right," Mycroft confessed.

"Hmm. When you turn over later, I'll work on other points diagonally above your navel to indirectly access these muscles," Sherlock told him. "Your back and neck looked all wrong to me this morning at the helipad. It took a good deal of self-control not to get my hands on you right there and then to unknot you."

Mycroft's sigh expressed a combination of immediate relief from the physical tension, a general resignation about everything that had been causing him pain, and an ironic observation of Sherlock's nature: "As you've always had very little self-control, I won't flatter myself that there was a lot of it in the first place for you to use up to keep from flinging yourself at me."

He jumped when Sherlock gave his boxer-clad bottom a sharp pinch, mirroring what Mycroft had done to him in bed a week ago.

"You have no idea how much restraint I needed today," Sherlock grumbled.

"Ouch," Mycroft protested dryly. "So much for being 'exquisitely careful' with me. I don't suppose that pinch accessed some mysterious reflexology point?"

"Oh, yes, it did – the one that connects directly to the deep fount of your limitless sarcasm," Sherlock huffed. "I was exceedingly restrained today, despite what you might think was all evidence to the contrary."

Mycroft took the time to consider an acceptable response, finally settling on a gentle reply to test the waters: "I know you were, Sherlock. Even so, when we've all calmed down – and sooner, rather than later – I hope you'll tell Mummy you're sorry for using such language on her."

Sherlock too was silent for a few seconds, but eventually murmured: "Mm, I know. I will."

No tantrums. No snapping petulantly or viciously. No childish refusal. He really seemed to be growing up at last.

"But for now, turn your mind off a bit," Sherlock continued. "I can talk you through what I'm doing, though you don't have to think if you don't want to, or answer if you don't want to, or do anything except relax."

"I am relaxed. I think I can safely say that even when I've had physiotherapy in the past after sustaining injuries, no one has ever touched me like this," Mycroft said. "Not that physiotherapy is at all relaxing, mind you."

"No routine massages for you, I imagine," Sherlock noted.

"Too risky," was all he said, but he knew Sherlock understood.

Asking a member of his team to give him a back rub would cross the line into unacceptable behaviour with subordinates, so that was out. But engaging a massage therapist was dangerous – even a thoroughly security-vetted one might be threatened or bribed just before he or she came to you. In many ways, it was riskier than paying for sex. A paid sex encounter would at least see you largely alert, adrenaline high, so you could react if something went wrong. The person could also be dismissed before you fell asleep. But anything could happen in a massage meant to completely relax you or make you doze off midway. Even if no harm was done in the session, a skilled therapist who had coaxed reactions from every inch of your body could inform enemies who were planning an abduction where your physical weaknesses were, and which points they could attack to most swiftly take you down unarmed.

"I'll do it for you from now on," Sherlock declared softly but determinedly as he worked on Mycroft's hip bones. "Obviously, I have no training in proper massage, but I know where all the muscles are, what they do, where they meet the bones, and how to ease tension in them. And I can always learn more conventional techniques."

"What you're doing is already perfect," Mycroft said. He didn't trust his voice at that moment to say more, as a thickness in his throat had formed at the thought that Sherlock not only cared broadly about his safety, but the little things too. The small things always got to him. Maybe because barely anyone he knew was allowed to think that Mycroft Holmes might need or care about the tiny details that made people human. Like affection. Concern. A genuine smile from someone who mattered. A thoughtful massage to relieve the bone-deep aches all over his exhausted body.

In this bedroom linked to the other side of the en suite bathroom of his Diogenes bunker office, Sherlock had already surprised him by undressing him all the way down to his boxer shorts, then making him lie face down, and working the deepest kinks out of his muscles and joints with precision instead of pouncing on him for sex. Mycroft had entrusted himself entirely to Sherlock, and what his brother had chosen to do for him had turned out to be exactly what he needed at this time.

"Regularly massaging this area should relieve the muscular discomfort that makes it hard for you to keep your pelvis level – you favour your right hip too much, and I've observed you're not as steady as I'd like you to be when you shift your weight to one leg," Sherlock murmured thoughtfully as he pressed into other points at the top of Mycroft's femurs. "In your job, with all its risks, you want to be as balanced as possible if you need to react to an assault. When you plan your workouts over the next few weeks, see what else you can do to strengthen your gluteus medius and minimus, right under and over here… and here."

"Noted," Mycroft mumbled into the pillow.

"How did you get this scar?" Sherlock asked, nudging the waistband of his boxers down a little and tracing the line of the old knife wound he'd sustained ten years ago in Kazakhstan. Mycroft didn't have to look at his face to know he was frowning.

Despite their having been fully undressed the other night at his house, the bedroom had been rather dark, and Sherlock hadn't had a good look at his unclothed back. Also, he'd protectively wrapped himself in layers of bespoke armour for so long that his brother hadn't seen him in a state of undress for… what was it? Nineteen years?... before they'd become lovers a week ago. Prior to that, the last occasion had been when Sherlock had barged into the bathroom in the Cornwall cottage their parents used to spend six weeks in every summer, until maintaining the property became too much trouble and they'd sold it. Mycroft had just stepped out of the bath that day when Sherlock had opened the door and entered without checking if anyone was inside. His little brother's eyes had gone wide at the full-frontal sight of him, and he'd blanched, then shot out of there, slamming the door after him. It was a few days after he'd fallen out of the ash tree (where he'd apparently been in pursuit of a beetle he wanted for an experiment).

Mycroft, on the other hand, had seen Sherlock in various states of undress over the years, most often while rescuing him from drug overdoses in which he'd managed to vomit all over himself, or from abductors, and of course, from the Serbian military. As well as during that one exceedingly exasperating episode at Buckingham Palace.

Nothing about any of those occasions had been erotic in the least – certainly not while they'd been battling through them. Context was everything. In the depths of terror for Sherlock's life, despair at his self-destructive nature, and vexation with his inappropriate conduct, Mycroft had dispassionately catalogued every wound and scar on his brother's body. Only later… always only later… would he draw the memories up from the abyss of his mind and reframe them, wondering hopelessly what his skin would have felt like if he hadn't had to touch it only in the frenzy of an emergency; what that familiar/unfamiliar flesh would have been like under his hands if he'd only been able to hold it in a moment of peace.

And whether he viewed this with dispassion or in a reframed vision, he had yet to completely forgive himself for not preventing every one of the scourge marks that remained on Sherlock's back, albeit significantly faded, from the torture he'd endured in Serbia. Sherlock himself had let it glide off his back (literally) like he did with all the physical damage he'd sustained – from the bullet Mary Morstan had sent tunnelling into his liver, and John's enraged punches and kicks, to each plunge of the needle, ignoring his body in favour of his mind. It was Mycroft, ironically, who'd felt every agonising lash on his behalf.

Well, they'd survived. And he'd savoured it at last, hadn't he? That skin, that flesh, holding him in a spell of peace. Mycroft knew he would carry the memory of making love to Sherlock in his soul, to his dying day. But he wondered now what Sherlock's new perspective was on Mycroft's skin, flesh, body. He cared, it seemed. He wanted to heal him, and protect him, and hold him, it appeared. But how deep did it go…?

"Why don't I know about this?" Sherlock demanded. "It must have been bad."

"Kazakhstan, ten years ago," Mycroft revealed, gauging that Sherlock's feelings ran from little-brother concerned to new-lover curious. "An MI6 operation went wrong, and my cover was blown. I wasn't among the frontline operatives, but they still got to me. The fellow who came at me with the Kizlyar was probably aiming for my kidneys or spine, but I dodged. It ended up mostly a flesh wound. My team got me out."

"And I didn't notice you were that badly wounded the next time I saw you?" Sherlock asked.

"I made very sure you didn't notice," Mycroft stated matter-of-factly, turning his head so he could look at him. "Besides, the next time I saw you, you were so high, I didn't think you'd survive the comedown. You almost didn't."

"Oh."

"Lestrade was distraught."

"Was he?" Sherlock asked soberly.

"He'd thought you were just starting to stay clean. That involving you more in his cases was steering you in the right direction."

"You knew better."

"He wasn't wrong; you were going in the right direction," Mycroft murmured. "But I knew it would take a little longer. You never stopped completely, but gradually, you managed better. I still hope you will decide, one day, to part company with those substances permanently. I won't push you – that's never done any good – but I hope you'll make that decision for yourself."

"You're not going to be overbearing about it?"

"I think I always will be, in a crisis," Mycroft admitted. "But I'll do my best to hold back when it's not life and death."

"You'll still nag me."

"Probably. But Sherlock, in the same way that you want me to be as well as I can, I want you to be as well as you can. Can you see it that way?"

"Hmm. I don't know. Possibly."

"I will try to stay as well as I can, so that you won't have to worry about me."

"Good. Then you'll start with tackling your hypertonic tensor fascia lata," Sherlock stated firmly, working his hands into the outer edges of Mycroft's thighs, from knees to hips, ending with a dip of his thumbs into the hollow of his lower back.

"Ahhhh…" Mycroft vocalised another embarrassingly drawn-out vowel.

Proceeding with care, Sherlock's palms eased the tension along his sacrospinalis as his fingers pressed down on either side of his spine, working their way towards his upper back.

"I know I hurt you when I twisted your arm at Baker Street back then," Sherlock said softly, as he rubbed the base of Mycroft's right scapula and upper arm, then the left side, after which he massaged the base of his neck and pressed in deep between his shoulder blades. "But you really were much too stiff – I didn't have to push your arm too far up behind you before you were at your absolute limit. You need to stretch a lot more."

"Why? So you can twist my arm further next time?" Mycroft asked gruffly.

"If you don't behave like a prat again, I won't twist your arm either," Sherlock huffed.

"How comforting."

Sherlock added impishly: "Hmm… if I break your shoulder, I'll replace it with one of ivory like Demeter asked Hephaestus to do for Pelops when she ate his by mistake."

"What the devil would I do with a shoulder of ivory?" Mycroft growled.

"Tinkle out a tune on it? While I accompany you on the strings?" Sherlock snorted. "Oh, fine – we'll work on it regularly so we can increase your flexibility a little, then I should be able to force it about an inch higher before you yelp."

"Wretch," Mycroft muttered darkly into the pillow. "But hell and damnation, this does feel accursedly good."

"Your posture's much too stiff. This is to relax your rhomboids," Sherlock explained as he worked between the scapulae. "And here, at the base of your shoulder blades, here on your upper arms below the armpits, round the front of your shoulder capsule, and on the inside of your scapulae here… around the level of your second and third thoracic joints – working on these points eases your teres major and subscapularis. I think you know all that, but it's almost impossible to reach it on your own."

"I do know," Mycroft sighed, before adding a little grimly: "I've used it all before in the course of interrogating people as part of the less savoury aspects of my job, when other experts weren't available, and the situation was urgent."

"So I gathered. It's not something I like to think about. But who am I to judge? I've killed people in cold blood."

"One person," Mycroft corrected him sternly. "One very vile person." But then he paused and went on to sigh: "Hell, we are monsters."

"Stop tensing up, You're undoing my work," Sherlock chided, rubbing slow, gentle, tiny circles into the back of Mycroft's neck with his fingertips to relax him, keeping it up for a minute before he was satisfied enough to tell him to turn over.

Trying not to imagine that, face up, he would probably look even more like a pallid slab of hairy meat, Mycroft shuffled into position and gazed up at Sherlock, who was still wearing his trousers and his unbuttoned, untucked shirt, sleeves rolled up.

"The heating's excellent here, so are you keeping your shirt on for a reason?" Mycroft asked, partially because he genuinely wondered why, and partially out of self-consciousness at being so undressed in comparison. "It's not a suggestive question."

"I know it isn't," Sherlock said, working all ten of his digits into Mycroft's quadriceps. "Call it a symbolic gesture if you like. I intend to do this for you regularly, and as far as possible, I don't want your body or mind to associate it with other kinds of physical intimacy. This isn't about me angling for sex."

"I know," Mycroft agreed. "But I believe I have more than enough self-control not to succumb to Pavlovian reactions as easily as that. At least not all the time. Which means there's minimal harm in not keeping things separate once in a while."

And if you would cover me with your body now, I wouldn't feel so exposed.

"Are you saying what I know you're saying?" Sherlock smiled, working on Mycroft's inner thighs.

The smile was what did it. Mycroft's cock twitched in his boxer shorts, and Sherlock's eyes narrowed. "You're ruining my professional focus on providing you with non-sexual physical therapy, Mycroft."

"I apologise," Mycroft said, with near-total insincerity.

"Keep your pants on and let me finish up," Sherlock's smile turned cheeky, but he was intent on doing a proper job, and took his time on each muscle and joint that he assessed as needing relief. He pressed, kneaded and manipulated his way up Mycroft's torso, to the shoulders and arms, then lightly stroked his neck, right up into his jawline and temples.

As he watched Sherlock work on him, expressing his care through his hands, Mycroft returned to his thoughts about how deep that care went. He deduced that to Sherlock, he was primarily the brother he had once been at war with but wasn't hostile to any longer, and had the added novelty of now being his lover as well. However, to Mycroft, Sherlock was seared into his soul. His little brother might tire of the novelty, but Mycroft was forever marked by him. He would have to conceal the mad depths of his sentiment, his feelings, all the sins he had packed away under layers of concealment for years. It had to be enough that he could enjoy these fleeting moments of tenderness. Stolen peace between the rounds of gunfire, stolen love between the falling of the bombs…

But Sherlock was done with the massage, and Mycroft was drawing him down onto the bed for a kiss, slipping his shirt off, slipping his trousers off, and his boxers, wanting to see again that skin, that flesh, to brand into his memory all over again the marks which recorded such a history that he wouldn't change a day of if it had all meant that it would lead up to this – to them, like this.

"Not much room on this bed, is there?" Sherlock asked with an easy laugh as he slid Mycroft's boxer shorts off him.

"It's a purely functional bedroom for when I have to be holed up in this bunker office for days, for operational reasons," Mycroft explained, caressing Sherlock's face. "It's just for sleeping in. Uncle Rudy certainly didn't outfit it for lovemaking when it was his office and room."

"Who was it who smacked me hard on the rump a week ago for mentioning blood relatives when we were in bed together?" Sherlock teased, lying on top of him, fingers gliding through Mycroft's hair, messing it up irredeemably.

"Touché."

"That door leads into the passageway, but you rarely use it," Sherlock noted, glancing at the closed door on the wall opposite to the one leading to the bathroom.

"Yes. It's always locked and bolted," he confirmed, running his hands down Sherlock's back. "Except when I have meetings in the office with anyone other than Anthea. That's when I use it as a separate entry and exit so that I can lock the bathroom door on this side as a safeguard – can't risk someone else slipping into the bedroom from the office through the connecting bathroom."

"Ever secretly had a lover tied naked and spreadeagled to this wrought-iron bed frame while you worked in the office, knowing that when you were done waging war on some hapless group, you could shoo Anthea and team out and come in here for a well-deserved hour of fucking your little secret until he or she couldn't remember what year this was any more?" Sherlock asked.

"No. Would you like to be the first?"

"Would you let me?"

"I'd have to gag you," Mycroft told him, playfully tapping him on the nose. "You're too restless, too noisy, too intent on pushing the boundaries. You'd try to make Anthea come in here just to see how she'd react."

"Gagged and bound, I'd still make a dreadful racket," Sherlock agreed, burying his face in Mycroft's neck and nibbling at the skin until he moaned.

"Then I would have to threaten you to keep you quiet," Mycroft breathed.

"Oh? How would you do that?" Sherlock purred into his ear.

"I'd tell you that if you made so much as one squeak, I'd leave you tied up here without touching you even once, and I'd make you watch as I took my time bringing myself off – without any help from you. You'd be miserably hard and desperately engorged and leaking copious amounts of pre-ejaculate by then, but I'd leave you bound for another few hours until you were frantic for the loo, still obscenely erect. And then I'd send Philip Anderson in to untie you."

"Oh my god," Sherlock groaned, pulling back with a look of what appeared to be genuine horror on his face. "Anderson? For fuck's sake, Mycroft!"

"DS Sally Donovan, then? She would probably undo your gag only after she'd ranted at you for about thirty minutes for your 'freakishly twisted stupidity at getting yourself into such a moronic pickle' or some equivalent of the language she favours. And she would take pictures which she would then distribute to everyone in the CID."

"Damn it, Mycroft! Ugh!"

He took strategic advantage of Sherlock's distraction by the cringe-worthy mental images to flip them over on the mattress, calculating that he could manage, by a couple of inches, to avoid sending them tumbling to the floor. It worked, and he shuffled them both back towards the centre of the mattress, Sherlock beneath him now.

"You know what's scary about that?" Sherlock breathed quietly, running his warm hands slowly down Mycroft's sides.

"What?" He had barely felt those calluses during the unconventionally acupressure-like massage, but he could feel them now in the long, gentle glide of that dry touch. The prominent points of his brother's skin were hardened from hours of private fieldwork, haring over rooftops, grappling with criminals, playing the violin… those hands made Mycroft shiver.

"I can easily believe you'd do it," Sherlock whispered. "Keeping me tied up. Tormenting me for misbehaving."

"As long as you're not broken, bleeding or permanently damaged…" Mycroft began.

"…anything goes," Sherlock finished his sentence.

He covered that so-frequently insolent, rebellious mouth with his own, and though they'd kissed earlier, he really felt it now – the light burn of Sherlock's stubble against his own. Neither of them, it seemed, had shaved particularly closely this morning. It wasn't visually obvious, but he could feel the rasp, and it would leave marks. He didn't care.

"Fuck me, Mycroft," Sherlock tore his mouth away to gasp out.

"No, not now."

"Come on."

"Not yet. I mean it, Sherlock," Mycroft said as sternly as he could while panting lightly. "Not yet."

"What are you waiting for?"

"I'm not ready."

"Really?"

"Really."

"Tell me when you are?"

"I will."

"Like this, then, for now?" Sherlock asked hoarsely, thrusting his cock up against Mycroft's own, provoking an inelegant grunt from him as he registered the heat, the throbbing pulse of his brother's prick, swollen and silky/hard against his groin.

Sherlock grabbed his arse to pull him down firmly, and Mycroft let most of his weight rest on him, giving Sherlock all the skin and friction he wanted. Perhaps too much friction.

"Please tell me you have some lube here," Sherlock rasped as, despite the pre-cum and beads of perspiration starting to form on their skin in the heat of the room, things were starting to get uncomfortably dry, with the roughness of pubic hair and Mycroft's not-insignificant body hair getting into the mix.

"I don't, usually," Mycroft said huskily. "Most of the time, if I absolutely must – which is rare – I see to myself in the bathroom while I'm showering. It's the same at home. It's a tidy, mess-free solution."

Sherlock groaned.

"But," Mycroft went on. "Since you made your previous complaint a week ago about my lack of supplies, I have put some into the bedside drawers."

"Oh thank God," Sherlock exhaled.

Mycroft reached for the bottom drawer and produced a bottle of lubricant – much fancier than what Sherlock had carried to his house. Sherlock rolled his eyes at the brand, but drew a satisfied breath when he squeezed some out into the palm of his hand, slathered it over his own cock, then stroked Mycroft's a few times, bringing him to full hardness.

"We could have used this as a massage medium if I'd known it was there," Sherlock muttered. "It's good stuff."

"Only the best for you, of course," Mycroft huffed, right before the indignity of hearing himself whimper a little as Sherlock removed his hand from his shaft and pulled him in once more to thrust up against him, their lengths hot and rigid against each other.

Words fell away as the perfect consistency of the lube, the pleasurable heat of the contradictory smooth friction they were generating, and the delicious slide of their coated skin and hair went to his head like too much wine, and Mycroft let instinct take over. He held Sherlock down, thrusting against him, urgency scaling as he built up a rhythm, and it felt for all the world as if he were penetrating him, entering him, making him clutch Mycroft's upper arms and cry out as he did. He'd wanted to have and to hold this body, this flesh, this skin, to catalogue all its details in safety and peace, and he was holding and savouring it now. Savouring Sherlock.

"Mycroft… nnnghh…" Sherlock gasped inarticulately, his restless mind as much of a blank as it could be in these moments.

Their eyes locked. Mycroft gazed down deeply into those stormy greys so much like his own, except these were wide with trust and affection, glazed with want and need and… oh God, yes, submission. He felt something click inside him like a lock falling open, and it was too late to hold back.

He recklessly unleashed the depths of his emotions into their shared gaze.

At once, he saw that Sherlock saw it. He could immediately read it all over him, and it was too late to pull it back into hiding.

Although he had told Sherlock long ago that he meant the world to him, his brother had undoubtedly not grasped the full gravity of it – just how much Mycroft had meant it, with every fibre of his being. Well, he knew it now. He could see it radiating from Mycroft's gaze, plain as day: You are everything to me. Everything.

He read the shock in Sherlock's face as he understood the extent of what he'd hidden from him. But Mycroft was climaxing now, coming hard against Sherlock, sending spurt after spurt of his seed onto both their bodies, hot and sticky between them.

"Sherlock…" he whispered helplessly into his brother's hair as he came, wanting to pour out in words: It's all right. It's all right if you don't feel the same all-consuming love for me. For years, I told you to put away sentiment and feeling, so you never knew this was in me. I never expected even this much from you. I'll accept whatever you can give. It's all right…

He couldn't utter the words, but Sherlock was at his limit too, finding relief as he came with a throaty cry moments later, clinging to Mycroft. Clinging, thank God, not withdrawing. Just holding on to him and firing his cum between them to mingle with Mycroft's. As he quivered through the aftershocks, his arms slipped around Mycroft and held him tight, but in the warmth of their satiety as they overdosed on their insane cocktail of hormones, he truly couldn't tell if Sherlock's embrace was a wordless response of "I'll give you all I can", or whether he was telling him "I'm sorry, Mycroft, but I can't go that whole terrifying distance with you".

It didn't matter. For now, this was enough. For now, this was more than he could have asked for.

Revelation. Mycroft had spent so many years imprisoning his feelings for Sherlock in the dungeon of his soul that he might have forgotten how far down the abyss went. It descended further than Sherlock had anticipated. His senses ached just from catching a glimpse of that dizzying height, the distance he would have to fall to discover how deep it lay.

"Nine days they fell; confounded Chaos roared,
And felt tenfold confusion in their fall
Through his wild Anarchy…"

Like Satan and his angels plummeting from heaven into hell, Paradise Lost, in Milton's words.

Except that Mycroft's soul hardly needed to be a hell for either of them.

Then again, Sherlock hadn't foreseen this, hadn't calculated all the terrifying measurements…

So in the same way that he made mental breakthroughs when he'd been battering his head against a wall for too many minutes, he decided to come at this from another angle, to give himself a different dimension of space to manoeuvre in; a new perspective.

"Can I spend the day with you?" he abruptly popped the question to Mycroft as they lay side by side, catching their breath, processing the intensity of what had just transpired between them.

His brother, already well on his way to dipping a toe into a hell of his own making, couldn't suppress the startled look that flashed across his face. But at least it made him pull his toes back from the accursed lake of brimstone he'd somehow managed to put there all by himself.

"Anthea won't let anyone bother you for the rest of the day, so can I be with you?" Sherlock asked again.

"I think…" Mycroft began, collecting his scattered focus. "… I think I can pull myself together enough not to have to take the entire day off work just because my mother hurt my feelings."

He sounded a little more like himself at the end of that statement than he had at the start of it. Quick recovery.

"If you really must, you can work from home. But I'm not leaving your side today," Sherlock insisted.

"Sherlock, what just happened…"

Sherlock quickly rolled onto one elbow, propped himself up, and kissed Mycroft to shut him up. When, after a minute or so, he felt his brother's tormented mind quieten, he tilted back to say: "You need to think. I know that. I need to think. You know that too. But stop feeling so damned guilty for all the nothing that you've done wrong."

Mycroft drew his right forearm over his eyes and lay still and silent for a minute, blocking the world out, while Sherlock kept quiet and let him digest… well, stuff.

Finally, he uncovered his eyes, sat up, and retrieved his underwear. "We need a shower," he announced unexpectedly.

If Sherlock could come at a tangle of knots from another angle, so could Mycroft, it seemed.

"This bathroom's tiny," Sherlock sniffed. "Let's just towel ourselves down here and go back to your house to shower."

Somewhat to his surprise, Mycroft acquiesced without argument. They wiped each other down at the sink with a face towel, then went around the bedroom and office retrieving their clothing. While Mycroft tamed his hair into its usual proper state, Sherlock, on his orders, stripped off the bed sheet and replaced it with a fresh one from the linen chest of drawers across the room.

(Because Mycroft, apparently, had a not-entirely-unjustified paranoia that terrorist frogmen would surface from the Thames and dig their way into the subterranean levels of the Diogenes to find blackmail-worthy evidence of his seminal fluid mingled with his own brother's.)

Extreme, but not entirely unjustified. Because after Moriarty and Eurus and Charles Augustus Magnussen, Sherlock was pretty much putting nothing past anyone.

"I'll give that and the face towel a laundering at home before I drop them back into the laundry basket here," Mycroft told him, folding up both articles and slipping them into a black messenger satchel that he produced from one of the cabinet drawers in the office, and now slung diagonally over Sherlock's torso.

He called his driver, and they went home. Although they stepped into the spacious shower together, they got up to no mischief under the hot, falling water. It was oddly domestic and intimate in a peculiarly practical way: They washed each other's hair; Mycroft let Sherlock pick the shower gel he wanted – the Molton Brown Black Pepper – and they got themselves clean; they dried themselves with the same bath towel, but Sherlock was handed his own bathrobe (of course).

Mycroft dressed in trousers and a shirt that Sherlock chose for him – he refused to hand him a waistcoat, tie, or sleeve garters – and Sherlock was tossed a green silk shirt and wool flannel trousers. Mycroft insisted on pulling on his socks and leather Oxfords, while Sherlock stuffed his bare feet into a pair of bizarrely ornate velvet carpet slippers that Mycroft had mysteriously extracted from some hitherto unknown dimension of his bedroom.

Together, they went down into the bowels of the house, where Sherlock was tasked with tossing the bunker office suite's bed sheet and face towel into the washing machine, while Mycroft made tea. Following that, they repaired to the drawing room. Mycroft sat at the dining table with his files and papers neatly spread out over the long tabletop as he tapped away at his laptop – the very one Sherlock had once stolen.

Sherlock, for his part, hauled one of the armchairs from the unlit fireplace over to the dining table, close to Mycroft, and curled up in it with his phone and cup of Earl Grey, reading his messages, deleting most of them, and idly attempting to annoy John by leaving silly posts on his blog.

At some point, Sherlock dozed off in the armchair and was woken by Mycroft about an hour later. Hazily, he wended his way upstairs and crawled into his brother's bed. Mycroft slipped off his shoes and joined him there. But still, everything remained curiously, casually domestic as Mycroft sat cross-legged – actually sat cross-legged – on the mattress with his laptop on the duvet before him, while Sherlock plopped his head onto his brother's left thigh and closed his eyes, soothed by the slight movements of Mycroft's body as he tapped away on the keys, very much liking the warm, familiar scent of the slender body he was using as a pillow.

Every few minutes, when he stopped to read an email or think about how to word something in a paper he was writing, Mycroft would run his hands through Sherlock's curls and gently scratch at his scalp, as if he were a large cat in his lap.

They simply spent the day in each other's personal space like that, in one configuration or another, and it was all very close and intimate and calm – and both of them pointedly did not talk about the matter on their minds.

When the autumn sun started sinking below the skyline, Sherlock got up, put his own clothes back on, considerately placed the borrowed garments in Mycroft's laundry basket, grabbed his violin case, and kissed Mycroft goodbye. Declining a ride in the Jaguar, he rang for a cab, hopped into it when it pulled up, looked back only once at the house to see Mycroft's shadowy figure behind the window of the drawing room, and returned to Baker Street.

Once through the door, he was assailed by the warm, whirlwind chaos of his usual domain. This was domesticity of a different nature. Mrs Hudson came at him first with an amused gush of: "Oh, Sherlock! We had the battiest fake client in here this morning even though John said you were out for the day. Looked for all the world like Dame Edna Everage, she did, and all she wanted was a pair of your used pants! John showed her the door politely, saying that if she really wanted used underthings, she could have Rosie's diapers…"

"Well done, John," Sherlock muttered, waltzing into Mrs Hudson's kitchen and stealing a biscuit from the tray she'd just pulled out of the oven.

"Sherlock! Those are for tomorrow's meeting with the landladies' group!"

"Thanks, Mrs Hudson – tastes marvellous. Shortbread, isn't it?" he grinned as he breezed out of her flat and up the stairs to his and John's, where he found his best friend wrestling leftovers out of the fridge.

"There you are," John greeted him. "I was just wondering if I should text you to ask if you'd be back for dinner."

"I'm not really hungry."

"Then why are you eating Mrs Hudson's shortbread?"

"Because… it smelt good… and it was there?"

"Last night's stew will also be right there on the table in a few minutes – just let me heat it up, and get some of this bread, and we'll be set," John said firmly. "I'm not letting you go without dinner."

"Hmm," Sherlock murmured in non-committal fashion, seating himself in front of Rosie's baby chair and observing her as she banged out a random arrhythmic beat with her plastic cutlery on the built-in tray of her seat.

"Rosie's food is on the coffee table – feed her at least a couple of spoonfuls, would you please, Sherlock? She's been awfully distracted by every noise and object this evening and is barely halfway through her meal, and it's been a whole hour since we started," John called out over his shoulder.

Sherlock picked up the bowl of pureed… whatever it was… and held out a spoonful to the baby, who turned her head aside in a clear gesture of refusal.

"Watson," Sherlock intoned sternly to the child. "Your father believes that it is necessary for you to consume your evening meal."

Rosie gurgled out what surely had to be a mocking laugh in his face, before turning her head away again.

"Come on, Watson," Sherlock said persuasively. "If you eat one spoonful, I'll eat one corresponding spoonful of the not-very-good leftover stew your sire is quite pointlessly heating in the microwave oven, which will not render it any better-tasting than it was last night."

"How about you try to cook something once in a while that doesn't explode in our faces or have human body parts as ingredients, and we'll see how good it tastes, eh, Sherlock?" John responded snappishly from his end of the flat.

"Your father does not appear to be in a very good mood today. Eat this before he threatens to feed you some of the stew gravy."

"Or to cook both of you impossible creatures into a fresh stew!" John growled.

"That's interesting. I just mentioned Pelops to Mycroft today."

"Who?"

"Pelops. Greek mythology. Son of Tantalus. His father killed him, cooked him, and served him to the gods, who mostly figured out something was up and didn't eat the dish. But Demeter, distracted by grief over her daughter Persephone, who had been abducted by her uncle Hades as his bride, ate Pelops' shoulder."

"That sounds vaguely familiar from materials I read a lifetime ago, but I've long forgotten the details," John said. "Wait… Persephone's uncle took her as his bride?"

"And her father and mother were brother and sister," Sherlock glibly added to the incestuous horror of the tale for John.

"Oh, God," John groaned.

"Oh gods, you mean," Sherlock snorted. "But I was speaking of Pelops. Anyway, yup – killed, cooked, partially eaten. The eaten shoulder was replaced by the gods with one of ivory. Not sure what sort of ivory. Did they have elephants on Olympus?"

John turned around from the microwave to give Sherlock a baffled look, and to ask with a great deal of curiosity: "Is this the sort of stuff you and Mycroft actually talk about when your family goes to see your sister?"

"Erm. Well. Sometimes. Yes. Mythology and stuff."

"And these are your casual conversations." John sounded like he was just checking to make sure. It didn't make his tone any less disbelieving.

Sherlock shrugged in lieu of what would otherwise have been an equally vague verbal reply.

"Right. Did everything go smoothly today?" John asked, turning back to the microwave as it beeped, and opening the door to give the stew a stir.

"Sort of. No, not really. Mummy was in a bit of a mood, and took it out on Mycroft."

"Oh. That can't have gone well," John said, sounding concerned, putting the container back into the microwave.

"There was some tension. I'm afraid I snapped at Mummy. I'll have to apologise to her for my vulgar language. But minus the vulgarity, I'm not sorry I snapped. She wasn't being reasonable."

"So you spoke up for Mycroft. That was nice of you. I think," John remarked. He'd been on much better terms with Mycroft since Sherrinford, but some ambivalence towards him would probably always exist.

Sherlock tried again to feed Rosie – successfully, this time – while John plated the stew and bread, and carried everything over to the coffee table. Since Rosie had started on solids, they'd made a habit of sitting on the carpet or the sofa and eating their meals off the low table so they could easily feed and amuse her at the same time. The child would grow up bohemian and feral at this rate, no proper manners whatsoever, but that was all right – Sherlock had forgotten all his proper manners and every social convention at some point in his life, and look how he'd turned out.

Oh. Wait. No. The drugs. The manslaughter. The hours spent behind bars. Falling off rooftops. Getting beaten to a pulp. Hmm. Maybe not such a good idea after all.

"Sherlock, are you all right?" John asked after swallowing his fourth mouthful of stew and watching Sherlock nibble his way through his first.

"Mmm. Yes. We should make sure Rosie learns some proper table manners sooner rather than later so she doesn't shoot people and end up behind bars."

"Behind bars… table manners… wait – what?" John asked, thoroughly bewildered.

"Never mind. Stream of consciousness. Ignore me."

"Okay."

They carried on eating and feeding Rosie between bites, then Sherlock asked: "John, what are the isotopes of love?"

"The isotopes of… good grief, Sherlock, it isn't chemistry," John sighed. "Well, all right, love perhaps is chemistry in a way, but it doesn't come in isotopes."

"Types, then. Whatever you call it."

"Are you asking me a question you already know the answer to just so you can ultimately answer it yourself ten times more brilliantly? Or are you too lazy to Google what you don't know? Or do you genuinely think I have some insight to offer you?"

"Maybe the latter two."

"Fine. Let me Google that for you, genius."

A few taps and swipes of his phone later, John announced: "Here you go. There are different answers and interpretations, but if we go with ancient Greek guidelines as well as good old C.S. Lewis' take on things, we roughly have four main types: storge, philia, eros, and agape. Very briefly: storge is responsible love, like between parents and children, or among family members in general; philia is the love for siblings or close friends; eros is romantic and sexual love; agape is what the religious like to think of as God's love for his people, but which the non-religious term unselfish or unconditional love."

"So…" Sherlock ventured cautiously. "If someone has always seemed to have storge and philia love for me, and I realised not long ago that it was agape too, and to top it all off, it now turns out that there was plenty of eros as well, does that mean…"

John stared at him. "Is this purely hypothetical? Or does this someone exist? Because that sounds to me as if such a someone would be completely, utterly, crazily, stupidly, head-over-heels in love and lust with you."

"Okay… and if I previously only maybe just barely had storge for this someone, then managed to shift into philia gear a little before it became a lot, and ramped it right up into eros, to my surprise, then began getting a bit agape-ish too…?"

John stared harder at him. "Then it sounds like you're gradually falling in love in return with this hypothetical someone – oh God, is this hypothetical or not?"

"It's… it's difficult to give you an answer."

"Okaaay, are you doing something weird in your mind palace right now?" John asked, dropping his fork and lowering his voice. "Is this another one of those deep, involved, drug-laced Emilia Ricoletti things taking over your life – are you having an affair with an imaginary friend? Are you high right now?"

"I'm not high, John. And how old do you think I am? Five?" Sherlock growled.

"Sometimes, yes," John said flatly, ignoring his offended glare. "Wait… is this about Irene Adler? Did she come back?"

"The woman? No… no, John. She didn't."

"Well, yeah, the combination and order's all wrong, anyway – with her, it was clearly plenty of eros first with a dollop of virginal flailing on the side, then more eros, and maybe a teensy bit of compassionate agape and nothing more."

"'Virginal flailing'?" Sherlock glared harder at John.

"Sorry, but you absolutely have to know what I mean, Sherlock."

"I do not."

"Look, seriously, Sherlock. Are you getting involved with someone you shouldn't be? Is this another dangerous person?"

"I… I can't say."

"Does this have anything to do with that super-secret dinner date you had three weeks ago, when you left the house looking positively… what did Mrs Hudson say? Ah, yes, 'positively edible', she said, after you'd left. Does it?"

"John, it's… I can't…"

"You can't say it. I get it. It's difficult."

"Yes."

"All right. Then let me say this. If this person, real or imaginary, is in any way, shape or form not good for you – just not safe for you in any manner – and you might be about to make a mistake by going for it, then talk to me first. Can you talk about it at this moment?"

"No. But I'll… try to talk to you, if I think it's a bad move."

"Good. What I'm going to say next is awkward, but I'm just going to put it out there: I am primarily straight, as you know. But I've, erm, experimented before, and wasn't completely put off. So what I'm saying is that if you just need someone to be with, I'm open to being with you. I'm not gay, but if it's to keep you from going off the deep end, I'd jump the fence for you. Only you, Sherlock."

"John, I don't know… I…" Sherlock began, hopelessly mentally flailing for words, and failing, before settling on: "Thanks, John. That means a lot to me. It's a bit insulting, but still, it means a lot to me."

"Well, you know how much you mean to me when I can insult you in the same breath while sort of propositioning you."

"Who do you think you are?" Sherlock asked in mock-disbelief. "Mr Darcy?"

John laughed. "You'd make a terrible Elizabeth."

"Oh, I don't know – isn't my face rendered uncommonly intelligent by the beautiful expression of my dark eyes?" Sherlock asked.

John guffawed. "Oh my God, you've been reading Pride and Prejudice? Wonders will never cease. Did you steal that from Mycroft's library too? 'Beautiful expression of your dark eyes' – that takes the cake, Sherlock."

"What? I'm not beautiful enough for you?"

"Oh, shut up and eat your dinner, gorgeous," John muttered. "But really, totally seriously, Sherlock? I mean what I said. And you know you can talk to me about anything. After all we've been through, you can, you know. Anything. I might insult you a bit, but I'd still hear you out in the end."

"John."

"Hmm?" he murmured, already focusing on his food and Rosie again.

"Thanks."

"You're welcome, genius."

Revelation. Mycroft was quite probably completely, utterly, crazily, stupidly, head-over-heels in love with him. And Sherlock, who'd thought that he was finally returning his long-concealed affection, realised that he hadn't begun to map the depths of his brother's feelings for him.