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They have, in the blood between them, a history;
there was a time when Jim would bend his neck to Mycroft’s shoulder, their faces lit by torchfire
(Mycroft, who embraces surveillance like an old friend - because it is a monster, much like him - knows how light and shadow can change the face; and he has seen Jim’s face in sunlight once, two thousand years ago, standing outside of a temple where Mycroft stood in, when he was pink and round and his eyes were soft brown and searching like only mortal eyes search, with a defiant faithful doomed hope, and it was all so wrong, and so Mycroft took him into the temple, into the shadow and into the holy places where he belonged)
(Mycroft will never be able to pretend to Jim that there was a point to it. “You were hungry,” Jim says, “Oh, oh, don’t look at me like that. It’s ok, baby, no. I understand. Even old and noble Mycroft gets hungry.” And then he will press his body to Mycroft’s body, pointlessly. Because the early Christians had it all wrong. Pleasure is not a sin, and Jim will hate him forever for taking pleasure away from him. “I know I do,” he says, tongue at the curve of Mycroft’s ear, sharp. Mycroft pushes him away
and not for the first nor the last time)
(When Mycroft settles in Londinium, Jim disappears to the North, and for a century Mycroft breathes a heavy sigh of relief, then takes a deep, senseless breath, and razes whole peoples to find him again, makes cemeteries of small civilizations. “It was good practice, wasn’t it?” Jim says, fingering a small piece of mosaic tile displayed in their home. And when he finds Jim again he finds him living like a wild animal, a barbarian, almost happy, and drags him back to Rome, kicking and screaming, causing earthquakes the entire way.)
together they would watch the bread and circuses, from the summum seats, at Jim’s insistence, high the among common crowds and their common clatter. He will never understand why Jim loves them so much. And Jim’s neck to his shoulder, tilted back, eyes heavy lidded, as if overwhelmed with seeing everything or nothing at all, and he makes a soft pleased satisfied cooing noise as a man bleeds to death, below them, his neck torn open. The wound, Jim says, his own cold dead hand on Mycroft’s knee, looks so warm, does it not.
Jim’s children are many but few and far between (Mycroft follows close behind and cleans up after the mess) it takes Jim centuries to cope (Jim is not a lonely creature by nature, Mycroft ought to have known, the day he died, how Jim’s fingers curled greedily at his shoulder, digging deep, Mycroft wonders often - but not quite guiltily - if he killed Jim before the boy had ever felt first love; and in the beginning, he forced Jim to kill them, so that Jim would feel the consequences of his little Frankenstein whimsies, his frustrations and hungers, but Jim - brows furrowed lips pouting but black eyes blown out hollow - killed them like a brat breaks toys, and it occurred to Mycroft that Jim was enjoying it, and that he was creating them to watch them die, again and again.
But Sherlock belongs to them both. Jim maintains an uncomfortable close eye on the descendants of Mycroft’s mortal family, who do not die out (“They fuck like rabbits!” Jim tells him, and giggles, high pitched and wavering. Mycroft has not seen him in months, and he is dressed like a vagrant, “Yes,” Mycroft says, “That is how it works.” Jim frowns)
they do not know of his existence except as a vague entertaining story passed down for generations, filler during mealtimes, decades of mealtimes, and soon even that fades, he becomes known only as their great Roman forebearer, the legitimacy of their patrician blood (“phoney,” Jim calls him in the late 80s; he is back in the West, because all the fun, so he says, has been sucked out of being Soviet, Mycroft locks his desk drawer, where he has been been saving images of Jim in the Red Army greatcoat, little white flecks of snow melting preciously in his pitch black hair, there and then gone, and yet always back in the winter. Snow as immortality. The Soviet Union is past falling and Mycroft had a hand in it, to get him back. “Phoney,” Jim says, “You weren’t even Roman. Look at you. You’re a paper mâché fucking emperor. I could set you on fire.”
Of course I am not Roman, my dear, Mycroft says, as soon as Jim has settled down again, he has exhausted himself trying to kill Mycroft, which he does every other decade; he is panting on the floor of Mycroft’s office - he never stops breathing or blinking, Mycroft notes with a shock, curiously human habits - and he growls and he shrieks like a caged animal, then lies still, his hand tracing circles over the ruined carpet as if trying to burn himself. “Stop embarrassing yourself. I am Etruscan. I believe in Kings.”)
Jim is delighted with the French Revolution until he grows bored of it. He is sitting in a cell waiting to be beheaded, and Mycroft slams him against the cell wall. “Is this what you want?” he says, and he consumes Jim’s mouth, he consumes Jim, until Jim is tattered and seeping borrowed blood over his pale blue skin. “Yes,” Jim says, “Yes,” and then he roars, beating helplessly at Mycroft and the walls of the cell and even his emotion sounds inhuman, and Mycroft is not sure if Jim wants him or the beheading, or both. Mycroft both wants Jim to die, wants it more than he has wanted since his death, but knows that he will never let it happen with the same ice fury of want. He tears out Jim’s throat, and takes him back to London.
Sherlock, with his unruly nest of Italian curls, dressed in red and standing tall, in the long, long luscious halls of the Vatican. Full of the confidence of his Roman forebearers, painted on the ceiling above his head, where most do not bother or dare to look. He mocks the Medici in one ring-sealed letter, and works for them in the next. (“Whore,” is the first Mycroft hears of him from Jim) but he takes neither man nor woman to his bed; he takes no one to him at all. “I want him,” Jim says, jokingly, and in two years, more fervently, “I need him.” He is high and aloof like Mycroft, who finally seeks him out and sees him for his own - Jim is half frenzied, half catatonic, and keeps trying to go out during the day to glimpse Sherlock in the sun - and it is like looking into an odd, warped mirror (it does not escape him that they have the same bright, bright blue eyes.) Sherlock sees him, too, paralyzed by a lightning bolt stretched across centuries, they stare at each other, Sherlock confused, and Mycroft irritatingly sad. “Make him mine,” Moriarty says, after he has thrown Sherlock out a window several stories high, “Make him mine, now, or I will. I will take him from you. I will take all of them from you. I will make them mine, and then I will kill them all.”
Mycroft is not sure why he agrees. In the future, he will say that Great Britain does not negotiate with terrorists, and Jim will laugh and laugh. It takes less than a decade for Jim to grow restless and bored again, and he tries to kill Sherlock, who dies, disappears underground. “I know he’s still alive,” Jim says, he is crushing a rat, then petting its limp lifeless fur, and they are all alone together in the Great Plague of London, surrounded by empty houses and the dying and the insane. “I know what you two did, big brother. I don’t care. Out of sight out of how ever it goes. How is he? Does he still think he’s so clever?” Mycroft says nothing.
Sebastian Moran is fucking him. He will not be the first, nor the last. He is a huge army officer from the Burma Campaign, with wheat blond hair and bright blue eyes. At best, he can only cause Jim pain, but Jim has been broken like that forever. Moran does not seem to mind. “You know that he will kill you,” Mycroft says, Mycroft is also wearing a uniform these days, “or I will.”
Moran grins, “Yes, sir. I know.”
(Mycroft wipes Jim’s cheek of the blood, sweat, bile, tears. None of it belongs to them, they take take take, from each other, from the world. They have nothing to give. Jim leans into the touch.)