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V.
“Smoking indoors,” Sherlock carefully intones. “Isn’t there one of those... one of those law things?”
But saying this doesn’t make Mycroft stop.
Outside the morgue, Mycroft lights Sherlock’s cigarette with his practised air of brisk devotion, and thoughts of the other times unravel in Mycroft’s mind; he knows that Sherlock, closest mind to his own that he’s ever known, is thinking the same thing.
It’s been years. Mycroft looks at him and thinks I am allowing you to remember the other times.
I.
At the bottom of the jardin anglais (as mummy calls it), there is an oak tree. Mycroft likes to visit it whenever he needs privacy.
Sitting on the shady grass beneath the tree is Sherlock. He has his favourite toy, a wooden pirate’s sword (safe, blunted tip; little real damage possible) held to his waist with his belt. Very young, at this moment; only just at day school.
Mycroft ignores Sherlock, and takes out a box of cigarettes from his pocket.
“Did you buy those?” comes Sherlock’s sharp boy’s voice.
Mycroft sighs at Sherlock’s entirely inevitable interruption. “No. They’re father’s.”
“Did you steal them?”
“I liberated them.”
“That means you stole them, but you’re pretending to be nice about it.”
“Very good,” Mycroft tells his little brother with a particularly put-upon intonation and, as louchely as any thirteen year old could ever manage to do, he takes a match from the box in his pocket and lights up.
Mycroft’s voice is in the process of breaking, the varying deepness and squeaks to his words a gauche reminder that they will always be growing up apart.
“May I have one?” Sherlock asks.
“No. They’re bad for you. And you’re too young.”
“So are you.”
“However, I was old enough to be able to obtain them.”
“I could get them. That’s easy. Father always has a packet left on the table in his study.”
“I don’t doubt that you could get them, Sherlock. But what would you do if you got caught?”
So young then, that Sherlock had not yet found out that getting caught doesn’t trouble him at all.
II.
“You hate smoking, and you’re old enough to buy your own now anyway,” Sherlock says, having opened Mycroft’s bedroom door without knocking and spying Mycroft tapping out ash on the windowsill. “Yet you still take father’s cigarettes.”
You get all the attention, Mycroft thinks.
Sherlock does not always conclude his deductions aloud. Yet.
“Where’s mummy?”
“In Provence.”
“‘And Pierre’s in her.’” Sherlock mutters.
“Ah. You do know. But do you understand?”
Sherlock stares back. Not yet a teenager, and yet too sullen, too old.
“Do you understand? Answer me, Sherlock.”
“I overheard Callum talking to the new housekeeper when she came over and he was pruning the dahlias,” Sherlock admits. “He said ‘And Pierre’s in her’ and the housekeeper laughed. What’s sex?”
Mycroft doesn’t pause. “It’s a special kind of hug only grownups can do.”
“Hugging, ugh,” Sherlock says, and pulls a face. “You and I never hug each other.”
“No,” Mycroft says. “We do not.”
Sherlock is still scowling.
“Were you asking to witness my reaction?” Mycroft asks this graceful, lanky, clever boy who has changed a great deal even since Mycroft’s last exeat. “Do you really not know what sex is?”
“You over-estimate me,” Sherlock says, his fixed stare disconcerting. “You always were the only person to ever do that.”
III.
Mycroft, at one a.m., returns to his set at Balliol to find Sherlock lying naked on his bed.
“You’ve had sex,” Sherlock says as soon as Mycroft enters the room.
Ignoring him for a moment (Mycroft won’t give him the satisfaction of looking shocked), he finds his packet of cigarettes and lights one, an ignition of delayed post-coital glow.
“With a woman.” Sherlock scrunches up his nose. “You’ve dressed perfectly, but there are creases in your clothes that weren’t there before, and you usually fold your clothes – unless there’s a good enough reason for you to discard them on the floor. You tried to hide what you did, but you know me, you know I’d notice something you missed, so really you tried to look like you tried to hide it.”
“No. You’d see either way; it’s not like I have a choice!”
“If you really didn’t want me to see, you wouldn’t have had sex.”
“Flawlessly logical, but entirely wrong,” Mycroft says. “When you want sex with someone and you’re in the process of getting it, you don’t pause to think what you’re nosy little brother might think when he next sees you. But then, I suppose, how would you know how to feel that want for another, ...”
There are few phrases Sherlock hates more than how would you know.
“I feel like that for you.”
“No you don’t. Wrong kind. Familial, not want.”
“How dare you try telling me you don’t feel it too.”
A rare occurrence: Mycroft has to bite down to stop himself from gasping.
Sherlock’s thin enough for Mycroft to see ribs; taut, pale thighs taper to pubic hair darker than the hair on his head, and his currently disinterested cock. Sherlock’s feet flex across the sheets. Sixteen years old. Mycroft remembers himself at that age. He was interested in how you got people to do what you wanted them to. Sex is good for that.
It’s hot, and the windows aren’t open. He can smell sweat and tobacco.
Mycroft’s not as keen as Sherlock, he’ll freely admit, to watching people and deducing, and what’s the point in finding out for yourself if you can pay someone else to do it for you?
But he can do it, if he wants to. Observe and see, and deduce that the frayed suit cuffs are likely to mean a recent redundancy, that those kind of lines around the eyes are not the sign of an insomniac but the sign of an adulterer. And so on.
Mycroft sees Sherlock (more than that, knows him, better than anyone) and can tell he’s a virgin from the way he acts, thinks, is.
But to know that, he had to look in the first place.
IV.
By the time Sherlock has taken an address at Montague Street, he is too old to be so obstinate and yet continues to stalk working police officers, conduct experiments of dubious legality. He at last has cigarettes of his own (bored now, post Cambridge), and other stimulants besides. Thus, Sherlock has rendered Mycroft’s half-hearted rebellion passé, and so Mycroft, with the iron willpower he usually reserves for diets, has given up.
Today, Mycroft is minding Sherlock, because he is the only person who can and will. They sit in chairs dragged to directly face each other from opposite sides of the room, unmoving like rival kings in chess. Mycroft wants to tear up his diary, or at least he may as well; this tedious sitting in has meant he’s missing tedious dinner with the Portuguese ambassador, and Sherlock hasn’t even bothered to dress. He has wrapped a bed sheet around his bottom half. The sheet isn’t particularly clean.
“You were always my unfortunate undoing.” Mycroft says haughtily, continuing as if what he has been thinking about were spoken components of conversation. “Aged sixteen, your school expulsion cost me a Congratulatory First... ”
“... it did not,” Sherlock snipes uselessly. “You spent far too much time networking at the union” (he says networking as if it’s an evil word) “to get that much work done. I wouldn’t mind in the slightest if you leave me alone now. Go and have dinner with the sodding ambassador.”
Once again, Mycroft has managed to be riled by his little brother. “I don’t want to be here. What if you died?”
“What if it’s whilst doing something spectacular?” Sherlock says. “I want to die and be remembered. You just want to live forever.”
“Stay exactly where you are,” Mycroft tells Sherlock menacingly as leaves the room in a few angry steps and steals one of Sherlock’s cigarettes that he’s confiscated, hoping that Sherlock somehow doesn’t notice. He locks the door, goes outside and lights up. Feels himself relax. Kicks at the pavement in the way that he wants to kick out his weaknesses (he hasn’t many, but he knows them well).
His thoughts return to that night at Oxford, the result of a disgraced Sherlock Holmes running away to Balliol and inviting himself into Mycroft’s rooms for a lengthy stay. Mycroft had experienced sexual release only a short while before, yet upon seeing Sherlock again he had felt an urge that went beyond the desire to assert control. It had repulsed and excited him.
It makes him hard, and ruins his brain. It’s far from the first time he’s revisited the memory. Every time he smokes.
“You smoked,” Sherlock says, standing by the window that overlooks the street, when Mycroft returns. “You don’t smoke.”
Even if one wants to live forever, one can still be brave.
“So many things I don’t do,” says Mycroft sardonically, and lightly closes his hand around Sherlock’s throat. (And this is almost enough, for it causes a rare look of shock to cross Sherlock’s face). He kisses him against the wall, indecent tongues slick against each other and a thrilling flush to Sherlock’s cheeks. He kisses him against the wall, even know he knows that Sherlock will taste the smoke, and all of Mycroft’s hard work will be undone.
“Sleeping with your brother,” Sherlock carefully intones. “Isn’t there one of those... one of those law things?”
But saying this doesn’t make them stop.