Mystrade - The Call - from The Personal Journal of Mycroft Holmes

Chapter 2

         He had the gall to touch me? He had the unmitigated nerve to take my arm delicately as though we were - lovers? It had been nearly a year since he'd been this near to me. Not since that damned phone call from Sherlock bidding us to the aquarium. 

        I must have been as tired as Greg looked. My eyes wouldn't stay open without my full concentration, and I was again drifting back into the memory of that night. It had been perfect. The heat of his attraction to me pressed against my inner thighs, throbbing through both of our trousers. The smell of his cologne as I kissed his neck. The warmth in my stomach as he pressed his groin harder and harder against me. We were perfectly primed to lather one another with soap from head to toe with the improvident purpose of making each other as unclean as possible. We would have been enraptured by one another under the steady fall of water and steam.

        We were both fulfilling our professional duties by reporting to the aquarium. Who was to know that we'd be there to watch Greg's friend, Mary, as she liked to be called, take her final breaths? Who would have imagined there existed a woman who would lay down her own life to spare Sherlock's? I surveyed Greg with alarm in my eyes as he watched Dr. Watson grieve over her body. I watched as his resolve became fissured. Each of Dr. Watson's sobs chipped away another, then another promise Greg had made to me.

        "Mycroft?" His voice broke through my retrospection.

        I opened my eyes and immediately pulled my arm from his grasp. "I'm growing impatient, Detective Inspector. I'll ask once more. Why am I here?" I spoke as I would to any other simpleton. He didn't deserve my favour let alone any bit of humanity I might be able to muster.

        "Look, Myc, I'm sorry. We had to be sure you were okay. And I couldn't stay with you. I had to take care of things, and this was the easiest way to keep an eye on you. We talked when you got here. You don't remember."

        I used the bed's controls to bring myself to a ninety-degree angle. The last thing I remembered was my brother preparing to shoot himself clean through the brain. "My name, Inspector Lestrade, is Mycroft. It has been at least thirty-five years since anyone has been able to justify a need to - keep an eye on me. And I am perfectly alright. I was locked in a room. That's hardly cause to hospitalise someone."

        Greg reached for my arm again, but I moved it abruptly before he could make contact with my skin or the poplin barrel cuff of my shirt. "You were almost killed. By your brother. You could have been in shock."

        "To be completely accurate, I was nearly killed by my sister," I corrected. "I'm not in shock. I don't have a trauma syndrome. I am perfectly capable now, as I always have been, of contending with Eurus' onslaughts."

        "I just wanted to be sure you were looked after." His voice, then, dropped several decibels as he continued, "I always try to protect you."

        "Laughable," I thought to myself without saying it aloud. I chose my words deliberately, "Well, then, in the future, perhaps you'll find the solicitude to protect me from you," I chided.

        He awkwardly adjusted his jacket, clearly not sure how to respond. His voice was again hushed, but there was now panic in his tone. "Look, Myc, that's why I said we need to talk."

        "Then let's talk." I sneered.

        He immediately started, "Well, I just think you need to kno-"