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As soon as Mycroft opens the door, Sherlock kisses him.
It is testament to the long day Mycroft has had that he doesn't instantly flinch away. Instead, for a vital 2.3 seconds (he's tired, not lobotomised, he can still count time perfectly), he tumbles into the kiss. Then he recalls himself and pulls away. But not far away enough, he realises a mere 1.7 second later. He's still only a few inches away from his brother's face and can see every colour in his eyes, every shade of crystal blue and diamond white and jade green. He feels his lips part by themselves, and Sherlock's breath is warm on them.
Today is Lazarus Day. A rainy day in June. Sherlock has spent it thwarting the best enemy he has ever had and jumping off roofs. Mycroft has spent it eating and staring at mirrors, waiting for calls and texts and emails. Everything has gone according to plan. Everything has gone according to Mycroft's predictions. Except this.
They had one year, a very long time ago. Actually, it was fourteen months, two weeks, six days exactly. Then they stopped by mutual agreement. Mycroft moved on to various other people and Sherlock…well, who ever knew with Sherlock Holmes? But Mycroft has never expected it to crop up again. Foolish really, not to predict this. Sentiment blinding him, he supposes. It always does with Sherlock.
"Come in," he says, and steps back so that Sherlock can step into the hall. He does so, then closes the door securely behind him and turns back to Mycroft, watching him with clever eyes.
"Just tonight then," concedes Mycroft, and kisses him.
They kiss open-mouthed, softly, then heatedly, and then furiously, until Sherlock is pressed back against the door and Mycroft has one hand on his too-sharp cheekbones and the other tangled in his hair. They kiss in every way, in all the ways, crashing and receding like waves on a beach, for what could be hours. Mycroft loses time in his head.
At some point they stop kissing and move it to the bedroom. He loses the time there as well.
Mycroft wakes the next morning to bright summer sunlight flickering through the window. He forgot to close the curtains last night - he had been too busy sinking his teeth into Sherlock's thigh if he recalls correctly.
Sherlock is asleep amongst the chaotic peaks and dips of sheets and duvet. In sleep, as in waking, he is a contradiction in terms. Sometimes he lies in a bold straight line, hands rested on his stomach, flat and angular like a shard of glass, and other times he sprawls like a child. He is sprawling this morning, one arm stretched out on the mattress away from Mycroft, the other tucked neatly under his cheek. His face is half raised to the sunlight, breathing regular, hair a mussed mess. He has such long eyelashes, Mycroft thinks. They are almost ginger in the sunlight.
Soon he will need to check his phone. There will be messages and emails, most of them from MI6 regarding Sherlock's transfer to lands abroad. There will be hustle and bustle and Sherlock will be out of the house by midday, out of the country by the evening. Off to sniff out Moriarty's last trail. Mycroft will not see him for a long, long time. He will not be able to watch the sun play along Sherlock's enviable cheekbones, nor inspect the gingerness of his eyelashes. Not for ages. Maybe not ever again, if it all goes wrong. And it could.
Sherlock shifts, then blinks his eyes open. They are colourless in the sunlight, absolutely colourless. Mycroft fancies that if he looked really closely, he would be able to see through to the back of Sherlock's skull.
"I had a strange dream," Sherlock murmurs. He doesn't mention the fact that he caught Mycroft openly watching him sleep, or that he is still watching him.
Mycroft doesn't mention it either. He says, "Oh?" and continues to stare.
Sherlock blinks, and there is a flash of ginger eyelash against sunlit cheek. "We were in a forest," he says. "I was trying to cut us a way through some vines to the path, but the more I cut, the more appeared. I couldn't get us out."
Mycroft's mouth is suddenly dry. He has words for everyone except Sherlock.
Sherlock smiles, half into his pillow. His lips are a shade of coral pink. "Then you told me I was being stupid and torched the vines with a burning branch, and they all shrivelled up and fell away. Typical of you. Always ruining everything."
Mycroft smirks, all his words suddenly coming back to him. "I think that sounds about right," he says.
Sherlock snorts then stretches lazily, arms reaching behind him as he arches up. Mycroft watches his limbs tense and extend, watches the muscles under his pale skin shift in the light. He wonders if Sherlock is warm from the sun, and presses a finger to Sherlock's shoulder to find out.
Sherlock stills. He is warm, but not from the sun. It is the warmth of his own flesh, brought to his skin by being burrowed under all those covers. It is the warmth of his blood. Mycroft, without really meaning to, slides his finger to the pulse in Sherlock's neck. There is a strong, steady beat. There is blood in Sherlock's veins. His heart is working as it should be. Sherlock is alive.
Mycroft counts to ten, and then he does it again, and again, and again.
He realises Sherlock's eyes have fallen to half mast while he has been counting. He leans forward and kisses the coral pink lips, and they fall open eagerly for him.
He intends to map out Sherlock's mouth with his tongue, memorise each touch and taste as if he is young again and they have just decided to end it. But Sherlock's own tongue has beaten him to it, and he is kissing Mycroft like he wants to steal the oxygen from his lungs.
Mycroft has forgotten that separation goes two ways.
When they part, they are both panting from the struggle. Sherlock is half sitting up, the sunlight painting his body in cream and gold.
"We'll still stay in contact," Sherlock says. He is about as breathless as Mycroft feels. Mycroft takes several deep breaths before speaking himself. "Of course," he says. And then he feels it necessary to add, "Though taking the strictest precautions."
"Ringing payphones, things like that," Sherlock cottons on.
"Yes," says Mycroft, though he'd rather not say anything.
Sherlock doesn't stiffen, but something flickers in those colourless eyes. "No personal visits," he realises.
Mycroft finds himself scoffing. "Of course not, don't be foolish."
Sherlock has never been as adept as hiding his emotions as Mycroft has. There is a reason Mycroft is the Ice Man and Sherlock is not. His breath stutters for approximately 4.5 seconds. "How long have I got?" he asks.
Mycroft still doesn't know the time. What a thing not to have checked. "Maybe about five hours," he says.
Sherlock takes Mycroft's face in his hands and kisses him. And kisses him, and kisses him.
They part at the front door, Sherlock in his new regalia as a Belgian navy officer, his hair cut short and dyed, coincidently, ginger. At least his hair will match his eyelashes, Mycroft thinks faintly.
The car comes around the corner. Comes to take Sherlock away. Sherlock turns to Mycroft, but they've never been very good at farewells. The farewell on the year they decided to break up included the shortest of handshakes, and before that they had never touched at all. But this time Sherlock leans forward and presses his face momentarily into the crook of Mycroft's neck. He doesn't kiss his cheek but it somehow feels more meaningful for the lack of that.
Then the car is there and Sherlock's effects are being loaded, and Sherlock gets into the car and closes the door without a glance back. Mycroft doesn't watch the car drive back around the corner, because that would imply sentiment. Instead he steps back inside the house instantly and closes the door as well.
The house is silent. The house is always silent, but it is only now that Mycroft is noticing the silence. He claps a hand to his mouth and refuses to make a sound. He refuses to break the silence.
At some point in his early twenties, Sherlock refused to talk to Mycroft. It lasted three months. It wasn't particularly awful, because Mycroft just put maximum surveillance on him and spent a month and a half sunbathing in Barbados. But there was something missing, even so. A something that wouldn't go away until he was in the same room as Sherlock again, listening to the usual vitriol spilling from Sherlock's mouth.
It wasn't about control. He'd never been able to control Sherlock as it was, and anyway he'd had all that surveillance on him. He'd just missed the personal touch.
Mycroft's two years is like those three months. He takes a frankly ridiculous amount of holidays, each destination the complete opposite of the one before. From boiling hot Africa to coldest Siberia. When he is away from London, he can forget who Mycroft Holmes is. He can forget Mycroft Holmes ever had a brother at all.
He's absolutely fine when he's abroad. When he's in London, he is not.
He gets a call from an unregistered number to a phone almost nobody knows he has eight months, three weeks and four days in. When he picks up, Sherlock's voice says, "Mycroft."
He hangs up the phone immediately. Then, in a rage, he gets Anthea to track down Sherlock via CCTV (he is Kentucky at the moment), throws the phone on the ground and stamps on it until it is in pieces.
He throwing the shreds of the phone away when Anthea gives him the number of the nearest phonebox to Sherlock. Mycroft wrestles with himself, then rings it on one of his disposable phones. He has 30 seconds before the line can be traced.
Sherlock picks up almost straight away.
"Don't you ever," Mycroft says in fury, "Do that again. (3.7 seconds) You know your line is being tracked you foolish, stupid, stupid boy - are you trying to get yourself killed? (7.6 seconds) I didn't spend countless years dragging you out of your messes so that you could end it all being shot by a Texan with a short temper, (11.3 seconds) I swear to god Sherlock, if you ever do that again I will come right over there and I will kill you myself - and why aren't you saying something? (16.9 seconds) Say something!"
Sherlock is silent for a moment. (24.4 seconds) Then he says, "I don't want to stop you talking."
Mycroft waits too long. (29.6 seconds)
He hangs up.
He measures the time in seconds for a few days, then stops because mad people do that sort of thing. He goes to the same restaurant at the same time every night and eats the same thing, for three weeks running. This is mostly to make the current agents spying on him nervous enough to distract them from a particularly tricky manoeuvre he is negotiating in Algeria, but also because he likes the routine. Routines are comforting to him. He likes cutting up time into little pieces like that.
One night, as he leaves the restaurant, wrestling his coat on and telling himself to walk home because he really needs to lose some weight, the payphone near him rings.
He stares at it. He is the one who rings payphones. No one else does that. That's his signature, for pity's sake.
There is only one person who would be cheeky enough to use Mycroft's own trick on him.
He forces himself to walk sedately over to the phone and pick it up, as if he does it every day. "Good evening," he says politely.
Sherlock says steadily, "I think of you all the time. You talk to me every day. You are always in my head and I never forget that. You are there to guide me, teach me and help me. I will never lose you in there and you will never abandon me. You are with me, always. There, 30 seconds exactly." And he calls off.
Mycroft presses the dead phone receiver to his forehead for a long, blissful moment. There is a redial option, and although it is far, far too risky, he can't help his hand hanging over it for a while. He is only human after all, he supposes.
Sentiment, he thinks. He puts the phone back on its hook and walks home.
He bloody hates Sherlock Holmes.
One day, approximately twenty-five months, two weeks, four days, eight hours and twenty-five minutes after he last saw Sherlock, Anthea approaches his desk.
She says, "Sir, this terror alert really is getting very serious now. We need an expert."
She puts a file down on his desk, labelled Serbia.
Mycroft looks at it for exactly 5.7 seconds. Then he smiles.