“Ugh,” groaned the voice from the other side of the room, for at least the twelfth time in the forty-one minutes Mycroft had been seated across from him.  “Bored!”

He didn’t look up from his work at his brother, slumped sideways over an armchair.  Giving it attention had always made it worse when he was four years old; it was little different at twenty-four.

“BORED!”

Of course, making it worse was only a matter of degree.  Mycroft didn’t resettle his fingers on his laptop keyboard, because that would have been a ridiculously obvious cue even to someone of Sherlock’s limited caliber, even in his currently reduced state.  His brother had never been reticent about spreading his own mental distress around to everyone in the vicinity, nor pressing weak points when he found them.

He settled for: “You appear to have been finding suitable amusements to pass the time.”

Sherlock glanced around the room for the visible cues Mycroft had noticed, lingering on a barely-visible tannin stain on the wall from a thrown tray, the rumpled corners on the bed sheets indicative of a rushed sheet change by emotionally unstable staff, the signs on the roommate’s bedside tabletop of recently removed charging cord, betraying an offence so great that he was planning to avoid returning to the room for as long as possible.  There were eight further, subtler signs of the frustration and fear Sherlock was deliberately inspiring in staff and fellow inmates alike—the position of the curtain, the scuff marks on the floor, the angle of the knot on the bin bag—but as always Sherlock’s eyes took in only the showier signs and skimmed past the subtler ones.

When they’d been children, Mycroft had always assumed that Sherlock must be being obtuse on purpose.

It took a lot to make an impact on the hardened staff of a facility like this.  Of course, from what Mycroft could see, Sherlock was doing his very best to be difficult, even if there was no chance that he could get himself thrown out.

Sherlock had always been an expert in finding the right buttons to push in order to push people away.  Always been more invested in that, than in finding the right buttons to push them into doing what he wanted.

“You’ve been spending all night tuned in on your favourite station again,” said Sherlock, subsiding back into that boneless slump carefully calculated to portray the maximum of unjustly wounded affront.

Mycroft’s hand didn’t move up to touch the corner of his own eye.  It was faintly possible that the eye drops he’d used that morning to avoid arriving at work looking like he was operating on only three hours of sleep had formed a scattering of hair-fine crystals on his lower eyelashes.  More likely, Sherlock was fishing.

“Don’t you have other things to do than watch me suffer, Big Brother?” he sneered.  “Running the country, perhaps?”

“Strangely, yes, I do,” returned Mycroft without looking up.

He did.  He really did.

Of course, the midnight eye strain had mostly been those other things.  He actually had managed to be productive well into the wee hours of the morning, only occasionally checking in on the comforting CCTV link to watch his brother—alive, if distinctly uncomfortable from withdrawal, safe and well cared for—in the secure rehab facility where Mycroft had found him an urgent placement.

With the other images living behind his eyelids still so fresh, turning off his laptop and going to bed hadn’t been a viable option.

He hadn't seen Sherlock’s seizure—his brother was too smart, and stupid, to undertake risky behaviour within sight of the city’s CCTV network—but every excruciating moment had played vividly in Mycroft’s mind when he’d seen the state of Sherlock’s hair and the position of the paramedics’ cuffs.  He hadn’t seen the motion of Sherlock’s chest cease, not with his eyes nor any camera he could reach, but the vomit stains on his shirt and the grey tinge of his skin had nonetheless painted every detail of the too-still image of how the emergency staff had found him.  He hadn't seen Sherlock’s heart stop—he’d had no eyes inside a moving ambulance—but couldn't help but read the near-fruitless efforts to restart it in the line of the paramedic’s shoulder, in the misaligned cords on the defibrillator.

He hadn't seen the dealer giving Sherlock the drugs that led him to an overdose.  Nor Sherlock’s state of mind spiralling to the point where he wouldn’t care.  Not until too late.  Now, the moment he should have noticed wouldn’t stop playing out in front of him.

Sherlock would never have considered another reason Mycroft’s eyes might be dry and bloodshot.  A reason that had nothing to do with watching too much grainy video footage, trying to settle the coruscating deductive chains in his head into solid, unmoving fact.

Mycroft had always wondered what it was like in Sherlock’s head.  Slower, obviously.  Less of the crystal clarity that made up Mycroft’s perception of everything around him.  Not the lobotomised vacancy of the rest of the world, but… less complex.  Less precise.  Less vivid, in the reconstructed images it produced.

Difficult, clearly, given he was still trying to find the perfect chemical cocktail to make it all grind to a halt.  Perhaps it was harder for Sherlock, to be able to touch clarity, but so rarely truly reach it.  Of course, it all depended on how deeply you wanted to see what you were looking at.

“I’ve informed Mummy that you’ve gone abroad, taking care of an assignment for me,” said Mycroft, as though offhand.  “Incommunicado.”

And hadn’t she been displeased about that.  Involving Sherlock in classified government work, as though Mycroft would ever have sent him into danger.  She hadn’t doubted him though.  No one ever did.  No one except Sherlock.

“I shan't hold my breath expecting a rescue, then,” sulked Sherlock.

Mycroft frowned, disappointed, although ostensibly still busy with his report.  He was going to have to read over the whole thing again before he let Anthea see it.  Tedious.

“Sherlock,” he told the screen.  “If Mummy knew why you were in here…”

From the corner of his eye, he saw Sherlock flush but not retreat, glaring as he abandoned the loose-limbed sprawl and folded his body in on itself instead, arms convulsively tightening around his knees.

"Of course," Sherlock snarked sullenly.  "Mustn't upset Mummy, Sherlock."

“To see you like this,” said Mycroft severely, “wouldn't just upset her.  It would destroy her.”

He raised his eyes from the laptop to look full at Sherlock for the first time since the previous day, and Sherlock looked back
with eyes full of guilty refusal to back down.

The dark shadows underneath were deep, the jitters receded today but the restlessness still in full force.  He’d got even less sleep, probably, than Mycroft.  He’d lost more weight, too, in the last twenty-four hours, dehydration shrivelling what little flesh there ever had been on his bones and leaving him positively skeletal.  And he hated it here.

It was more than the withdrawal, more than the lack of access to an easy high, more than the sense of injustice at his involuntary confinement.  More than the dull roommate and the insipid entry-level psychology this place dealt in.

Sherlock hated that it was Mycroft who had put him here.

The deductive backlash hit Mycroft anew with painful force—Sherlock’s hair, his face, his fingers, the creases in his clothes, the marks of his shame and defiance around his eyes—not just the dry facts and the myriad implications, but the feeling of them; the reaction to them.  It had always been thus with Sherlock, in a way it never was with anyone else.

Mycroft didn’t glance down at himself to see what Sherlock was seeing in return: he knew perfectly well what was there.  His tie was settled a fraction of a millimeter to the left of straight, there was a nervously pinched crease in the cuff of his left sleeve, a mis-shaved hair affecting the symmetrical alignment of his sideburns, a frayed thread on the button of his waistcoat left unclipped, and the usually crisp creases in his trousers gone limp from the higher than usual humidity of his skin.

If Mycroft had seen the signs, he would have known.  Beloved relation in hospital, his appearance said.  Sick with grief and worry, neglecting his work, flayed open with terror and remorse, obsessed with the fallout from a nearly-too-costly oversight.  Weakened by caring for someone who didn’t understand or appreciate it.

It was plain, even for an idiot to see.

Mycroft could, of course, have dressed with more care.  It had taken a deliberate effort not to, but words had never been the
language he and Sherlock spoke, even if Sherlock had been inclined to trust them.

Perhaps, given Sherlock had noticed the eyedrops too, he’d gone too far.  He was practically shouting at this point: shouting for Sherlock to hear and understand.

“And you’re enjoying it!” spat Sherlock, surging to his feet, fists clenched and eyes red-rimmed and manic with a rage that had no outlet.  “Locking me away in here so you can stare at me whenever you want like your prize pet goldfish?  What do I have to do that you’ll let me out of this hell hole?”

Sometimes it was difficult to remember how very much he had to slow himself down to let Sherlock catch up.

“I’m not the one who landed you in here, Sherlock.”  Mycroft gave him a look of disappointed condescension that only made his brother glare harder.  “You’re your own worst enemy.”

“I’ll never forgive you for this,” vowed Sherlock.  “Never.”

Mycroft snapped his laptop closed and stood, his time up.  He had been here for fifty-one minutes.  The car would be pulling up outside in four minutes and thirty-seven seconds, Anthea waiting inside with the briefings he needed to cover before his afternoon meetings and a sandwich to eat on the way.  He had no more time for sentimentality today.

“My cross to bear,” he agreed, tipping his head in acceptance of the truth of his brother's statement.

He opened the door of Sherlock’s room, and he didn’t look back.

“Don’t you walk away from me!” yelled Sherlock, and something heavy hit the wall beside the door with an unsatisfying thunk and a cascade of splashing water.  A plastic water jug, from the sounds of it.  Probably intended to miss; Sherlock was shaky, but not that far gone.  “You’re my worst enemy, Mycroft!  You'll always be my archenemy!”

“Until tomorrow, little brother,” said Mycroft evenly, as he strode towards the locked gate and nodded to the nurse to let him through.

Once he’d turned the corner of the hallway, he brushed himself off, shaking out the speaking creases and tucking in the uncomfortably loose threads, erasing all the signs that might have betrayed the depth of his most vulnerable pressure point to anyone with the wit to see it.

And if he wiped his eyes, it was only to ensure the crystalline residue that Sherlock had spotted from the eye drops wouldn’t betray his current distraction.

The Ice Man had work to do.