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Mycroft does not turn around at the footsteps behind him.
"Those won't be necessary," he says.
There is a jingling of metal, and then the heavier set of footsteps retreats from the room.
Still gazing out the window, Mycroft speaks again, now addressing the man whose pair of doubtlessly smoke-blackened lungs were breathing behind him.
"So, Sherlock. I imagine you're curious as to the manner of your punishment."
The breathing remains steady, deliberately controlled. Breath in, pause, and then out. In, out.
"Hardly. I know what must be done. I know why you're here."
"Oh?" Mycroft smiles humourlessly at his own reflection in the glass, "Pray, tell me what you've deduced."
A single, heavy intake of breath.
"You can't make it go away. Not this one. Magnussen was too well connected and a misstep concerning him will cost you everything. Saving me would cost you everything. And expose our entire family to every enemy you or I have ever made, vultures who have always been circling, ready to swoop in the moment you can no longer provide any protection."
"Mostly my enemies, Sherlock, try not to flatter yourself too much."
"I must be put away, and regular prison would be a death sentence. There are people who would jump at the chance to kill me if I were incarcerated at anything less than a maximum security institution. I will have to stay put there, very likely for the rest of my life."
Rotting away, with nowhere to go and nothing to do. In other words, Sherlock's particular version of a living hell. Sherlock's voice does not waver but his breathing trembles very slightly and Mycroft hears the fear in it. Absolute terror.
"If something big," Mycroft says quietly, "Something sufficiently urgent that requires your skills should ever turn up - I may be able to negotiate a form of freedom for you."
A small, wry puff of breath.
"Like I said. On balance, very likely for the rest of my life."
A long silence falls, in which Mycroft listens to his brother breathe behind him. In, out.
When Mycroft speaks again, his lips barely move.
"There is also the MI6 offer I had mentioned, a few days ago."
The breathing hitches.
"You would do that... for me?"
Mycroft turns, and looks finally into grey eyes that mirror his own, and knows that this act has sealed his little brother's fate, because now that he has seen the desperate hope that gleamed in them, he will never bring himself to extinguish it.
"Of course." he says, coolly, when any decent elder brother would be begging Sherlock to choose the other, and when he refuses, force him to anyway. But decency has never really been his area.
Instead he moves to step out of the room, already preparing the arguments to persuade the commission to sentence his own little brother to exile and certain death - because, though nobody but the Holmes brothers will understand, to Sherlock Holmes, it is a fate infinitely preferable to the alternative.
The breathing has been speeding up, building up to words.
Mycroft pauses at the door to hear them.
"I'm sorry."
That one elicits a wry snort of his own.
"No, you are not."
"Not for saving John's wife."
In. Out.
"For breaking your heart."
When Mycroft Holmes steps out of the room, his expression is unreadable. His mask is well in place, prepared to perform one last, brotherly act, for Sherlock.
***
When Sherlock steps from the plane, Mycroft is the first to greet him.
For a moment Sherlock's face is as inscrutiable as Mycroft's, then, a slow grin snakes along it.
"Something big?"
Mycroft merely turns his phone around to display the preposterious GIF still looping on it.
"Colossal." He smirks back.