"Has he said anything?"
Sherlock looked up from his seat at Mycroft's desk as his brother entered his office and glared the question at his brother. Mycroft just rolled his eyes and rounded the desk, pulling out the chair and pushing the younger man out of his seat.
"Must you present yourself as a nuisance at every opportunity, Sherlock?" he asked, needlessly brushing down the seat with his handkerchief before sitting in it himself.
Sherlock shucked off Mycroft's touch, huffed and flung himself down on the expensive leather sofa instead.
"Well, if you will make me wait while you pander to your cronies." he moaned, mindlessly etching at the leather arm with a fingernail, "I don't have all day to hang around and wait for you, Mycroft." He almost spat his brother's name as a sign of disrespect and complete nonchalance.
Mycroft raised an eyebrow but ignored the comment. He was used to his brother's jibes, and he was in no way in the mood to play "Let's banter with Sherlock" right now.
"He isn't talking."
Mycroft lifted the lid of his laptop and frowned as he began typing a memo. He needed to get clearance for the next phase of the operation, and he wasn't entirely sure whether permission would be granted. It was... unorthodox.
Sherlock, unhappy at being effectively ignored, leaned forwards from the sofa towards his brother's position.
"Let me speak to him."
For a long moment, the silence in the room was deafening. The rhythmic tick-tock of the grandfather clock could have been gunfire, and the muted noises from the rest of the building could have been rush hour traffic. The silence however, was louder than all of that. You could hear it; touch it; feel it.
Mycroft slowly raised his eyes from the keyboard of his laptop and stared at, or perhaps through, his brother. The intense scrutiny made Sherlock very uneasy.
"Utterly out of the question." Mycroft barked loudly, banging his fist on the desk and setting a handful of pens and pencils toppling over in their pot. "This is NOT a game, Sherlock. This is a matter of national security. Do you even comprehend that?"
Sherlock barely stifled the jump that his brother's unexpected outburst elicited. It wasn't often that Sherlock pushed Mycroft's buttons to the extent that the elder lost control of his temper, and the response had taken Sherlock somewhat by surprise.
He calmly and deliberately smoothed his fingers over the jagged nail etchings he had made on the sofa's arm and stood.
Without saying a word, he rounded Mycroft's desk and stopped alongside the oversized wing back chair, laying a hand on his brother's shoulder.
Mycroft leaned in to his brother's touch and closed his eyes. The soft moan that escaped his mouth betrayed the feelings that he was trying desperately to hide. Sherlock's touch was infrequent nowadays: something to be savoured; cherished even. It always rendered Mycroft speechless save for one word he could bring himself to mutter.
"Sherlock."
Sherlock smiled and gave the shoulder beneath his fingers a soft caress.
"Brother," he began, letting his thumb brush across the soft dip of his brother's collarbone, "We both know what he is waiting for. We know what he wants. You can't possibly be thinking about doing this yourself?"
The question was more of an exclamation of disbelief than an actual question, but Mycroft knew that this needed discussing, and that Sherlock was the only person with whom he could discuss this properly.
Mycroft straightened the pens on his desk, righting the pot and pointlessly fiddling with the replaced contents before raising his hand and placing it over Sherlock's on his shoulder.
"I do not see that we have any other option, Sherlock." he said quietly, letting his perfectly-manicured fingers entwine with his brother's slightly rougher digits.
"However, I will not allow you to once again sacrifice yourself for me."