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The London of olden times was profoundly filthy and yet, somehow, far too sanitized for its own damn good.
Leonard self-consciously scraped the soles of his borrowed shoes on the stone steps before daring to touch the gleaming brass door handle that gave entrance to the Diogenes Club. Not for the first time, he cast a wary eye down at the rest of his strange clothing, his incomplete grasp of history nowhere near prepared to assess the correctness of a dark suit that felt slightly too snug on his body. He had tried asking the other doctor in the room, the only man at their hideout whom he hadn’t wanted to punch in the face but John had been utterly unconcerned by his attempt at fitting in.
‘Don’t bother,’ John had sighed with an irritable shake of the oversized sheaf of printed paper sagging between his hands. ‘Try as hard as you like, it won’t be anywhere near good enough for Mycroft.’
As he followed a stony-faced escort into a stuffy parlour, Leonard was ready to believe him. The rake of Mycroft’s eye over his clothing was thorough, but unimpressed.
‘You’re late,’ he greeted coolly.
‘Think you’ll find I’m more like two hundred and fifty goddamn years early,’ he snapped as he dropped into the room’s second wingback armchair. Too late, he remembered the silent attendant hovering at the door but Mycroft’s bland stare was indifferent to any risk of eavesdroppers.
‘Can I offer you a drink?’
His eye slid to the prim tea set laid out on a spindly side table. ‘Any chance of a proper drink?’ he asked with a frown.
Mycroft pursed his lips, pausing thoughtfully before tilting his chin up to the waiting attendant. ‘The Elijah Craig twenty-one year old, I think,’ he decided. ‘And I suppose you’d best open another bottle of my usual,’ he added with a thin smile that held until the door snicked shut.
‘You do realize it’s barely past noon, Doctor?’
Leonard threw off an unrepentant shrug. ‘I make a habit of not drinking the tap water in backward civilizations,’ he grumbled. ‘All the microbes swishing around those lead pipes…’
‘How else do you expect us to keep that overpopulation problem of ours in check?’ Mycroft interrupted dryly.
He stared, eyebrow firmly raised. ‘You’ve got to be kidding me,’ he growled, but Mycroft’s smile was irritatingly ambiguous.
‘Did you bring what we need?’ Despite the smile, his tone was clipped short with impatience. Leonard bit his tongue and squirmed in his chair as he dug into his trousers’ pocket, all too aware of Mycroft’s flat, unwavering stare pinning him down. The parlour door cracked subtly open as Leonard found the object in question; he held it clenched self-consciously in his fist, slouching into his best imitation of lazy indifference as a cut crystal tumbler appeared at his elbow, followed by another at Mycroft’s side table before the attendant disappeared once more.
Only then did Leonard open his hand to reveal a strange plastic device: a weird caricature of some sort of hound dog, inexplicably dressed in a brown hat that topped its low-hanging ears with superfluous flaps. Not for the first time, he tugged at the hat to pop it away from the dog, which now had an even more disturbing metal tab protruding from its skull.
‘I hope this thing isn’t based on some shit you’re doing to real dogs in this century,’ he grumbled as he set the hat back in place with an oddly satisfying click.
‘I believe it’s meant to be amusing,’ Mycroft explained, though he sounded every bit as mystified as Leonard felt. ‘It’s a data storage device, nothing more,’ he added as he extended a long-fingered hand to accept the plastic dog. ‘Provided, of course, that your people were able to figure it out.’
Leonard bristled at the skeptical note in his voice. ‘Scotty says it’s all there in the schematics,’ he said firmly as he took his drink in hand. ‘Give that to your people, and we’ll see whether they can cobble together what we need to get out of your hair.’
‘I’ll press them to make all haste,’ Mycroft assured as he pocketed the dog-device. ‘The sooner we can resolve this unpleasantness, the better.’
‘Too damn right.’ He gave the contents of the heavy tumbler a testing sniff, a stunned stare. An experimental sip, and it was all he could do to choke back an entirely inappropriate groan.
‘Having second thoughts, Doctor?’
He stared at Mycroft over the tempting rim of his glass, the scent of the singularly best bourbon he’d ever tasted in his whole damn life still swirling thick through his senses. ‘Far from it,’ he said firmly. ‘Would take more than a fantastic bourbon to keep me in this barbaric place a second more than necessary.’
‘Even if you could single-handedly turn around this backward society of ours?’ Mycroft countered.
‘Not my goddamn business.’ He took another sip, savoured it while he still could.
‘Maybe not, but I think we both know better.’ Mycroft laced his long fingers together, inexplicably ignoring his own beverage in favour of luxuriating in the taste of his own smug smirk. ‘You’re a healer,’ he insisted with a narrowing of his too-small eyes. ‘You can’t stand what you see about you, and your fingers are positively itching to stick plasters on all those scraped knees and mend our miserable, broken bones.’
Leonard stared, bourbon tingling on his slackened lips. ‘What the hell is a plaster?’ he asked dumbly, but Mycroft waved the question aside.
‘You can’t stand to see sickness go untreated,’ he clarified slowly. ‘Just think of all the lives you could save that would otherwise be lost, if you–’
‘No.’ The implication burned off all the pleasure of his bourbon, left something cold in its wake. ‘No damn way. I’m no temporal physicist, but I’ve been reliably informed that any interference here could make everyone in my time grow scales and fins. Or something like that.’
Mycroft cracked a wider smirk that reeked of paternal indulgence. ‘That seems a profoundly unlikely risk relative to all the good you could do here.’
‘Don’t matter,’ he shrugged. ‘Hate to break it to you, but you’re on your own.’
‘Not necessarily,’ Mycroft mused mildly. ‘We’re a resourceful people, and I think you’ll find we have our ways of acquiring the skills and knowledge we need to survive.’
Leonard frowned, mind racing. ‘What the flaming hell are you…’ His confused gaze dropped to the drink dangling from his hand, which he swiftly set aside to reach into his jacket’s inner pocket. He activated his tricorder with a ruthless jerk of his wrist and flew its sensor anxiously over the rim of his abandoned glass, eyes narrowing as he absorbed the readings on the tiny screen.
‘You bastard,’ he groaned as he snapped the tricorder shut again with a roll of his eyes. ‘You had me going for a second there.’
‘Come now, I would never slip something unseemly into your drink,’ Mycroft protested wearily, though he sat more alert in his chair now, eyes sharp with covetous interest. ‘That bourbon is far too expensive for such foolishness.’
‘And my patience is wearing way too thin to put up with your idle threats,’ he snapped, tricorder clenched in a bloodless grip.
‘I never said they were idle,’ he argued with a shrug. ‘I only meant to assure you that spiking your drink would not be my preferred method of extracting information.’
‘How lovely that you have a preference,’ Leonard drawled. ‘Dare I ask?’
‘No need, Doctor.’ Another smile, close-lipped but bright as a bared tooth. ‘If I absolutely must have your secrets, you’ll be fully aware of what I’m doing to you.’
Leonard swallowed tightly, forcefully ignoring the acid pricking the back of his throat. ‘That’s a damn fine comfort.’ Another sip of exceptional bourbon did a lot more to dowse the anxiety from his voice. ‘Are we done here?’
‘Oh, I suppose.’ Mycroft’s flat stare dropped down to Leonard’s lap where the tricorder was half-concealed in his fist. ‘Unless you care to be more cooperative…’
‘What, and deny you the fun of some state-sanctioned torture?’ He hastily stashed his tricorder in its hiding place, pausing to check the phaser strapped neatly under his arm as he withdrew his hand from his jacket. ‘Hate to be a disappointment, but I’m not the type to skip from a drink to recreational pain on the first date.’
Still, it was a damn fine drink. Leonard made sure to swiftly swallow the last drops in his glass before rising from his chair. He was determined to escape without another word but Mycroft’s voice beat him to the door.
‘You may want to send the same message to that Captain of yours,’ he called out. ‘I assure you, my dear brother is not remotely interested.’
Leonard stumbled to an affronted halt, hands clenching at his sides. ‘That so,’ he snarled under his breath. ‘Jim might be more inclined to listen to me if your dear brother would stop encouraging him so damn much.’
‘Sherlock is… eccentric,’ Mycroft said slowly. ‘Sometimes, people tend to misinterpret…’
‘He preens like a goddamn peacock,’ Leonard snapped as he spun about. ‘Tell him to knock it the hell off.’
Mycroft sagged back into his imperious chair with a sigh. ‘As much as it pains me to admit it, I have very little influence over my brother’s more troublesome behaviours.’
‘Really.’ Leonard choked on a laugh, bit his lip as he recognized the weary weight of the world crumpling Mycroft’s face. ‘Yeah,’ he groaned in reluctant agreement. ‘I know what that’s like.’
‘So it seems.’ Mycroft plucked up his drink at last, gave it a testing swirl. ‘Perhaps reopening a rift in space and time will succeed where we both seem doomed to fail.’
‘Sure,’ he agreed generously, disbelievingly as he turned to go. ‘If only it were that easy.’