AN: This is a crucial chapter, and there will probably only be one or two more to go.
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If there was one thing Mycroft sincerely hated about his job, it was Q-Whitehall.
Those tunnels were built back in the war, and they desperately needed a reconstruction. But something else always took priority, because there were only few people who used them with any regularity. He topped the list, and he was seriously considering pulling his weight as far as reconstruction went. This was getting ridiculous, he thought as he stepped over a pile of rubble directly in his way to get to the door of his office – the real office, not one of the many fronts he had in various government buildings. No, this was the underground one under The Mall, the one about which only Sherlock, Miss Tylor and one or two trusted service people knew, the one where he went to work on the really important things.
He unlocked the door, entered, and found Mae sitting at his desk.
He felt like breath had been knocked out of him. The last time he felt like this was when Sherlock broke the code for Irene Adler. No, no, this was worse. This was his misplaced trust, his failure, his complete miscalculation, his own and no one else's…
His hand went for the gun almost of its own volition, but Mae looked up and said in her pleasant voice: "I wouldn't do that if I were you."
Her hand was on a small automatic.
He walked to the desk, and sat down heavily on one of the chairs in front of it. He didn't say anything – he didn't quite see what was there to say.
She leisurely finished reading the file before her and then turned to him. "Let's get the obvious out of the way, shall we?" She said. "I could have gone here at such a time that you wouldn't have found me here. I am reasonably certain that I could have arranged it so that it wouldn't have been immediately obvious that I had been here, too. And you finding me here has the potential to have so much backslash that whatever I found couldn't possibly be worth it. All-out war between us would be..." She looked away for a second. "I do not want to imagine it."
Neither did Mycroft, but it still seemed inevitable at this point. He nodded. She was right, that much was clear.
There was a long silence when they only looked at each other. In the end, Mae gave a small sigh, rose from his desk and said: "Come with me."
He did. They exited Q-Whitehall through the Westminster metro station and walked back to the surface, through St. James' Park and around the palace. Mycroft did not know where she was taking him, and mostly concentrated on war plans at the moment, though he did not exclude the possibility of further treachery.
They arrived at the French embassy, and smiling at the security, Mae took him into a lift which, after a swipe of her ID, descended into lower levels of the building. There, she led him through several locked doors to a metal one. She stopped before it and said: "You're welcome to unlock it."
Mycroft gave her a long look. She did not avoid his eyes, and after a moment, it was Mycroft who gave a very small sigh, took out two keys out of one of the inner pockets of his jacket, and opened the door.
Everything was in shades of beige there, like it was meant for Mae to blend in with. The only exception was the sole decoration in the room – a copy (at least he hoped so) of Lady with an Ermine. He was amused in spite of himself.
She noticed, and asked: "What, did you expect Delacroix?"
He did not answer, and it was her turn to sigh.
"Take as much time as you want," she said. "I won't be far." And then she left.
Mycroft had had the key to her office for a very long time now, as a precaution, as he had been almost positive she had to his. But he wouldn't have thought of using it, because there were just some borders that shouldn't be crossed, not unless in extremity.
Well, apparently Mae thought differently.
He half-heartedly looked through her office. Of course she had had time to remove anything she didn't want him to see, so this was mostly useless, but still, one always found out a little about people when one saw their most private spaces. So he was mostly concentrating on that when he came across a document about China which...well...well!
He wavered a little before sitting down heavily into her chair. It could be a bluff, of course, but it fitted so well and...his mind was whirling.
After he calmed a little, he went out to find Mae. By unspoken agreement, the headed to her flat.
"Why did you leave that folder there?" He asked.
She smiled at him – the smiles were getting more and more irritating, he decided. "Now the shoe is on the other leg, wouldn't you say?"
He gave a short burst of laugh. "And you expect me to believe you that is why you did it?"
"No, of course not. Cooperating on Cuba was still mostly advantageous, while this...is not."
"Then I repeat my question: why?"
"A breach of privacy should be reciprocated, do you not agree?"
"Given that you have had time to prepare, I can hardly consider it turnaround."
"Which is exactly why I left the folder there."
Did she mean… "It was a peace offering," he realized.
"Yes. A sacrifice, if you will."
"But then why attempt to start a war in the first place?"
She pushed up from the chair she had been sitting in. "Because I did not know where we were standing!" She replied. "And I had to find out, do you understand?"
"You couldn't handle insecurity, and so you took such an incredible gamble?" He asked incredulously.
"But it wasn't, do you see? I knew what to prepare for. It could have meant war, yes – I suppose it still could – or it could have made no big difference in our relationship, after I explained myself, and if you accepted my sacrifice. All predictable outcomes I could have prepared for."
"I should have just kept to sleeping with you," he said, with no small amount of bitterness. He found it ironic that he ended up betraying his country after all, exactly as people had been whispering about him before his relationship with Mae became official.
She was silent for a long moment. "I am sorry," she said at length, sounding very tired.
He turned to look at her. Her head was in her hands, and she looked like she aged by ten years in the last few minutes. She looked up at him, and her eyes were bitter. "I have been trying to keep up the mask," she said, "I don't know why, really, but of course I realized what an idiot I had been very shortly after I got into your office. But it was too late at that point, because you would have obviously found out I had been there, in time. But I fucked it up, didn't I, such a unique opportunity for closer cooperation between us, one I know you didn't offer lightly, and I bloody fucked it up because I couldn't take a risk."
It was his turn for a long silence. "I cannot just let it go," he said.
"I know," she replied. "I don't expect you to."
"Still, I do not wish for an outright war, if it can be avoided. I will have to think it through."
"Take as much time as you want," she echoed her words from earlier, and he left.
To begin with, he put her under maximum scrutiny, giving as much people to it as he could afford. She could not make a move without half a dozen of his employees knowing about it. He screened her mail, her calls, her everything.
She didn't complain, only commenting that it was only making her look forward to their dates more – because the front had to be kept – since that was when the secret service left her alone.
He also went to her office several more times. She started to leave notes for him.
Their dates became more tense. He asked about the China business in detail, and she answered willingly enough, wanting to appease him. She held out for a while, but then started asking about some of the things she had seen in his office too. He replied to a few of her questions, mainly where he believed clarification would actually help him, because it would prevent her from acting on incorrect assumptions that would have been detrimental to him.
The tension transferred to sex, too, and it was now harder and rougher. And they very meticulously kept to sleeping in different beds afterwards.
In mid-September, he took her to see the season-opener at Covent Garden. It was Rigoletto, and as always, it was heavenly. She looked heavenly, too, in her evening gown, diamonds glittering and her hair done up in an exquisite manner. During intermissions, she talked about the opera like the intelligent connoisseur she was, and was able to critically evaluate the singers' performances. It was idiotic, but he realized that he felt honoured to be there with her, in spite of everything.
Afterwards, they walked to his flat, since it was nearer. There was that lingering tension between them again, when Mae asked him in her falsely light tone: "Was it really a chance that they had Rigoletto as a season opener?"
"If I was trying to send a message," Mycroft replied, a little offended. "It would have been much subtler." He paused. "In fact, this seems more your style, remembering the backstory you created for Sherlock's supposed client soon after we first met..."
"If I had been trying to send a message," Mae replied, "I would have chosen Aida."
Mycroft had no answer to that, and they continued in silence to his flat and to his living room, where Mae suddenly asked: "Don't you wish you were normal sometimes?"
"Good God, no!"
She laughed. "I didn't mean it like that, not becoming a lesser lifeform. Just...you know." She was staring into distance. "If I could simply take your words and actions at face value, instead of instantly analysing the thousand possible reasons why you did everything you did. Sometimes, I think about how much easier that would be."
He thought about her words. "I feel ridiculous suggesting this, but...aren't you forgetting the reason for this relationship in the first place?"
She closed her eyes. "Maybe you were right, maybe I really am like my sister," she said slowly and quietly. But then she got up, paced to the wall, and her voice sounded frustrated when she said: "Is it really so wrong to want to have one human being to talk to? Just a single one? It's not like I set out for it being an eminence-gris of a foreign government! I could have done with a French mathematician, or physicist, or philosopher, anything! But when I do meet someone like that, and he turns out to be someone I can never really trust, is it really so wrong to wish sometimes it wasn't like that? Does that make me weak? Don't you get that feeling, ever?"
And Mycroft suddenly understood the meaning of the word lonely.
He had thought about Sherlock's words frequently, and lately had been even considering if his brother hadn't been right – he had been more content once Mae was in his life and he had someone to talk to on a daily basis, before it became so tense. But only now, in her desperate, emotional speech, he glimpsed what real loneliness was like.
He had deduced from her infrequent mentions that her parents were somewhere slightly above average as far as intelligence went, and while her sister was a bit better off, the gap between her and Mae was much bigger than between Mycroft and Sherlock. She really had no one, all her life.
While Mycroft's and Sherlock's relationship was difficult to say the least, Sherlock was someone Mycroft could actually talk to. He was not a goldfish. And his parents, while they masked their intelligence much more than their sons did, were both geniuses in their own right. There have always been people in his life who he could talk to.
The depth of her loneliness was staggering.
Mycroft battled with himself. All emotional expression was foreign to him, and yet he was moved with compassion – something entirely unexpected.
"I'm sorry," he said in the end, "I'm sorry that I can't be the man you'd need me to be, but you know I can't. I'm not sure if it wouldn't be better to just end this-"
"No!" She almost shouted. She tried to pull herself together. "I apologize for my lack of control, it won't happen again."
"That's not what I meant at all," Mycroft opposed. "I don't think less of you because you were honest with me just here. My need is not as big as yours, but that's through no merit of mine, I was simply luckier in my family circumstances. It's only that...I don't know if this isn't doing you more harm than good."
She approached him slowly, looking seriously into his blue eyes. "No," she said then, simply, and kissed him with all the passion from her previous speech.
It was the first sexual encounter they had that was truly personal.
They slept in the same bed, and the morning after, both pretended nothing special had happened.
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AN: Ermine is one of the symbols of Brittany. Mae is making a reference to Delacroix's painting Liberty Leading the People.
Also, I feel I should make it obvious that when Mycroft says he is preparing for war, he does not mean an actual, guns-involving war between France and the UK. That would have been absurd.
Oh, and as for the operas, Rigoletto's main theme is probably revenge (and how it can backfire). When Mae mentioned Aida, she was thinking of the princess who calls the guards on her beloved in defence of her country, only to regret it bitterly afterwards.