Chapter Text
He found the pictures not long after he'd moved into the house. He'd been effectively living with Mycroft for months before the man had worked up the nerve to finally invite Greg to officially combine their living arrangements. Those were the exact words he'd used, "combine our living arrangements." Greg, of course, had accepted, and six weeks later found himself alone in the house with a rare weekend off and Mycroft called away last minute to Whereeverthefuckistan to work his magic. Greg had started the day with a bit of a lie in, but was roused soon enough by his empty stomach.
He wandered into the kitchen to rustle up some breakfast. Greg was actually often awake before Mycroft on days when cases weren't completely fucking with his hours, so he was used to handling breakfast duty. Which was easy enough as Greg usually just had cereal, and Mycroft always had two slices of unbuttered toast. In return, Mycroft usually took care of dinner. On the evenings when Greg managed to make it home at a decent hour, he got the great pleasure of watching Mycroft prepare their meal while Greg sipped on a beer and they discussed their respective days.
Too often though, Greg wouldn't make it home until rather late in the evenings and would find a plate waiting for him in the warmer. Mycroft ate promptly at seven in the evenings and would not alter his schedule to accommodate Greg's own erratic one. Greg couldn't blame him one bit for that, and, though he'd already eaten, Mycroft would still join Greg at the table while he ate and they chatted about their day. It was all very routine and very domestic and very fucking wonderful, thank you very much.
So, that Saturday morning found Gregory Lestrade in his boxer shorts and tshirt sitting at the breakfast table alone eating a bowl of Frosted Shreddies contemplating what to do with himself on this rare free day with no Mycroft to keep him entertained. There were a few games of footie on later in the day that day, but it would be a couple of hours before anything worth watching would be on. What to do? What to do?
That's when Greg remembered the two banker boxes that had been stacked in a hall closet waiting for him to sort. As most of the things he used in his day-to-day life had long since been moved into the house before the "official combination," the boxes were all that were left from his apartment to sort through. That would kill some time and get a nagging item off his to-do list. After changing into his weekend uniform of threadbare jeans and a faded tshirt, Greg headed to the hall closet and pulled out the boxes with the remainder of his possessions from the flat.
The first was quickly sorted as off the charity shop. The other contained few mementos left him by his parents and two bulging photo albums. He was already fighting against feeling a bit pathetically lonesome by himself in the large house, and feared a stroll down his own memory lane would inspire more melancholy than nostalgia. So he decided to leave the mementos for later and put the unopened albums downstairs in the library where he'd spotted a few Holmes-family scrapbooks.
He left the box he'd labeled "Charity" on Mycroft's desk to let his minions take care of the dreaded "leg work," and and headed to the library, strolling over to the set of shelves in the rear corner of the room which contained the scrapbooks he'd remembered.
He was pretty sure he hadn't been meant to ever notice the books tucked away on the bottom shelf, but he'd once knocked the wonderfully heavy pen Mycroft had given him for his last birthday off of the room's table and it had rolled over into that corner. Floors in houses this old tended to have all sorts of odd warps and slopes, and, apparently, this room sloped towards the scrapbook area.
Curiosity getting the better of him, Lestrade dropped down to sit on the floor and pulled out a few of the albums. The first was obviously dedicated to 19th and early 20th century Holmeses, gray and unsmiling like most photos of that time, and the next album seemed to cover the "War Years." But it was the third album that he pulled that really caught Greg's interest.
This seemed to be a scrapbook kept personally by Mycroft's mother. He browsed through the first few pages of young and smiling Mummy and Daddy in front of the "country house," photos with other couples in evening clothes at extravagantly posh parties. He turned the page to find pictures of a glowingly pregnant Mrs. Holmes and snapshots of a pudgy, smiling baby who had to be Mycroft. The next few pages found a toddling Mycroft and studio portraits in the mandatory sailor suit. Further on started the primary and secondary school photos showing the progression of Mycroft from child to adolescent.
Throughout the years Mycroft had kept what he was sure Mummy had referred to as his baby fat. Ah, here was the reason behind so many of the jibes Sherlock hurled at Mycroft about his weight problem. Well, Sherlock was an ass and Greg mentally cringed when he thought of the teasing the slightly chubby, astoundingly intelligent, fussily particular child must have endured. But, to Greg's loving eyes, the young, rounded, open face and pleasingly soft pre-pubescent body stoked a pleasant warmth in his chest. To Greg, Mycroft had been...no other word for it...Mycroft had been adorable. Greg turned the page expecting to see sixth form photos and university snaps showing an increasingly svelte young man, features honing into those more closely approaching those his love sported today.
Therefore, he could perhaps be forgiven for the audible gasp he gave as the page settled. He could not have been more wrong. Photos from sixth form showed a Mycroft that had decidedly NOT started losing his adolescent plumpness. Indeed, this Mycroft was more what his own mother would have kindly described as stout. Hunching further over the album in his lap, Greg was positively riveted by the photos from the last few pages that featured what must have been Mycroft's university years.
There were no more formal portraits, only informal snaps with various family and friends with a visibly uncomfortable Mycroft gritting his teeth and giving what Greg knew to be his fakest smile. By the time these photos were taken Mycroft had moved into the realm of true corpulence. The overall effect was made only worse by the fact that the rest of the Holmes family tended toward the opposite end of the size spectrum. The few shots with the whole family resembled nothing so much as a still-life of three string-beans and a pin-striped pumpkin.
Greg leaned in even closer to the photos, gazing at them dreamily and giving in to an instinctive need to touch them by gently petting his fingers around the edges. Inspecting Mycroft's stiffly smiling face, Greg noticed that it had conversely gotten only rounder with the onset of adulthood. Slimmed down as he was now, Mycroft still didn't have the sharpness of feature of his brother; but in these photos, in the past, there was a fulsomeness to the face that made Greg's breath catch. His eyes appeared deeper set and any definition to his chin was hidden under double rolls of fat. Surveying down the body, Greg noted that the clothes were all cut to fit, so there were no straining waistcoat buttons, no fat oozing over a constricting collar. Nonetheless, even the excellent tailoring couldn't hide the sheer girth of the man. Greg knew that the skeletal frame was the same, but the extra weight made it seem as if Mycroft was broader through the shoulders. And, God, but did Greg Lestrade love a set of broad shoulders.
Greg knew Mycroft's hands to be dexterous and fine-boned, but in the photos they too looked broader and thicker. There were dimples over the knuckles on the back of the hand, fat rising around the knobby bones leaving four visible divots over each joint. Greg couldn't see the palms themselves, but he wondered if they too would look different, fleshier. Would they feel damp? Sticky even? He thought they might. He shifted his attention to the fingers, unintentionally memorizing their length and robust thickness.
Greg was surprised by the sheer immensity of this Mycroft, but he was absolutely mesmerized by the voluptuousness of the man. He knew that, in private, Mycroft could be gentle and even vulnerable at times, but never could he have imagined this luxurious softness. He wanted to caress it, feel the warmth of it, feel the burn in his arms and shoulders that fully embracing this man would cause.
He was unsure of how long he actually sat there gazing at photos and daydreaming about this unknown Mycroft before he became aware of his own body's rather visceral reaction. The warmth that the photos of child-Mycroft had stoked in his chest had descended south of his waistline in reaction to photos of university-Mycroft. Greg found himself in the middle of the library floor with a hard-on the likes of which his body hadn't achieved in decades and wondered what in the ever-loving fuck was happening.
Snapping out of his fugue,he slapped the photo book closed and hastily put it back on the shelf. He did not run upstairs to the toilet, he just walked rather swiftly, if a bit awkwardly due to the now nearly painful erection he was sporting. He slammed the door and leaned heavily back against it. Staring down at the front of his pants, he realized that he was chanting "What the fuck?" in a slightly breathless voice.
"Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ! What the hell is wrong with you? Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!"
At this point he had moved over to the sink and splashed his face with some cool water. Drying with a hand-towel, he caught sight of himself in the mirror. He noticed that his chest was heaving and that his pupils were blown wide with what he guiltily refused to acknowledge as overwhelming desire. He was as aroused as he could ever remember feeling and he was absolutely sick over it.
But why? He'd had a shock to be sure, he'd never really ogled anyone's fat before. But that wasn't really it. Besides, he had a pretty good suspicion that his arousal was focused specifically on fat Mycroft, not fat men in general. Trying to ignore his lust so he could think for a moment, he was suddenly quite certain that Mycroft Holmes hadn't ever wanted Gregory Lestrade to see those photos. Knew down to his bones that Mycroft would be mortally humiliated at the thought of Greg ever having opened that album.
"How he must have hated it," thought Greg, thinking of the initial reluctance Mycroft had show to sharing his body with Greg. He'd simply chalked it up to a lack of confidence in the sex arena. The man was usually busy running the country, it wasn't surprising that he hadn't had much time for romance. But now he wondered if there wasn't a deeper reason for Mycroft to have ignored the needs of his body for so long. Greg wondered if what he'd thought was simply Mycroft's shyness was instead some form of distaste.
He knew from personal experience that any visible loss of control was beyond difficult for Mycroft. It had taken months of patience and gentle coaxing on Greg's part to finally get the man into bed. It had taken an even longer period of constant encouragement to get the man to finally really let go in their bed. Oh, it had been worth every moment. Two years into their relationship, Mycroft was now a fairly confident and surprisingly playful lover. But that was only for Greg. No, it wouldn't be any sense of vanity that would cause Mycroft mortification over Greg seeing those pictures; no, it would be that Mycroft associated his own obesity with a lack of control. And he knew Mycroft was not ready to share that struggle with Greg.
And suddenly a lot of other things started to make sense. The same breakfast everyday, the regimented dinner times, even the skill in the kitchen. What Greg had just assumed was fussiness and typical efficiency were in actuality Mycroft's arsenal. They were his iron-hand exerting control over his own body. The man saw his own body as an errant adversary who must be constantly contained.
That was why Greg was so instinctively panicked. Knowing Greg had seen the photographs would be bad enough, but Mycroft would be devastated by Greg's arousal. If fat Mycroft was his Mycroft's arch-nemesis, then Greg's attraction would be the ultimate betrayal. He couldn't even bear the thought, hating the idea of giving Mycroft another reason to feel at odds with his own body.
The problem was, though, that the arousal wasn't going away. His mind, his instincts, knew this wasn't right, but his body didn't seem to care. He'd opened Pandora's Box, and it was too late to shut it back.
He closed his eyes in defeat and perfectly recalled a photo of Mycroft in black-tie standing next to an elegantly dressed Mummy under a banner that read "Happy New Year! 1987." It was the first picture in the album of a truly, ponderously fat Mycroft. He felt his cock twitch in his pants, and his eyes flew back open.
"Shit Shit Shit!" Giving into the inevitable, he undid his jeans and pulled them down with his boxers. He glanced down at the near-purple head of his cock and the copious precome oozing out of the slit. His eyes drifted shut and image after image of Mycroft, beginning with that first photo and continuing through to the end of the scrapbook flitted through his mind. It was like a flip-book of images making a movie in Greg's mind of a steadily inflating Mycroft. He thought about how those clammy, soft hands would feel on his skin, feel running across his chest. He thought about those podgy fingers touching his face, skimming the nape of his neck, pinching and twisting his nipples. He thought about a moist palm and thick fingers wrapping around his cock while he kissed Mycroft's lips and squeezed his own fingers into those doughy shoulders.
Drowning in these thoughts, Greg licked his palm twice to make it good and moist, then took himself in hand, swirling around the head to gather the precome to use as further lubricant. He stilled his hand and started thrusting into his closed fist until he felt the muscles in his thighs trembling. He spit into his other hand and slid it back through the opening in his pants to palm at his sack. Pushing into one slick hand and rolling his saliva-covered balls with the other, he started to lose his rhythm. He began stroking with his hand again, giving a little squeeze each time he reached the spongy head. Feeling the burn of orgasm starting low in his abdomen, he brought his other hand away from his tightening sack and used it to fondle the head and finger his slit while his other hand slid up and down the shaft in almost a blur. Eyes screwed shut and panting for breath, he finally came with a shout and shot thick ropes of come all over the bathroom vanity, the images of meaty Mycroft still burning in his retinas.
He leaned on the vanity until he caught his breath, cleaned himself off, and rezipped his jeans. He washed his hands then found cleaner and paper towels in the cabinet under the sink and briskly cleaned all the come off the sink and faucet, even the bit that had splashed onto the bottom of the mirror. Greg then did did what he thought any red-blooded male in his position would do: he headed to the liquor cabinet in the den, grabbed a bottle of Scotch, turned the telly as loud as he could stand, and proceeded to get drunk off his arse.