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It wasn't until well into their second drink that Mycroft began to feel he really should have asked Lestrade to postpone things until another night. His concentration was waning alarmingly and he suspected his composure was also fraying at the edges. Indeed, Lestrade broke off in the middle of his sentence, and the abrupt pause pulled Mycroft's thoughts up and away from the discomfort in his gut.
"I'm sorry, Greg. I beg your pardon?"
Lestrade tilted his glass. "Yeah, but you didn't hear a word of that, did you? What is it? Do you need to be somewhere else?"
The loo, Mycroft's brain helpfully supplied. "No. There's nothing pressing at the moment. I apologise. I-" Something gurgled with impending unpleasantness, and Mycroft grimaced, weighed embarrassment against untruth and erred on the side of hoping he wouldn't be laughed at. "I'm afraid I don't feel very well."
Strangely, Lestrade's face was nothing but friendly, genuine sympathy. "Do you want to take something? I've got a few paracetamol."
"Thank you. But no, it isn't a headache. I attended a... business dinner, which doesn't seem to be agreeing with me." He leant forward, somewhat gingerly, to set his glass down. "The whiskey may have been a mistake."
Lestrade finished his own drink off with a swallow. "I've been there. Do you still want company, or do you want I should go?"
Mycroft paused, calculated. Wished. "I've no desire to send you away, but I'm not likely to be very good company."
"Nothing wrong with needing a bit of looking after. Here, take the sofa so you can stretch out a little." Lestrade picked up their glasses. "I'll make us a tea instead."
Mycroft blinked at him, then accepted the hand up, allowed himself to be steered towards the sofa. "Tea would be very welcome. Thank you." He relaxed diagonally into the corner of the sofa as Lestrade departed, and felt some of the pressure in his stomach ease. Nothing wrong with needing a bit of looking after? Of course not, but that was a sentiment applied to people like Sherlock or Greg. Not –
Lestrade stuck his head around the doorway. "Peppermint okay?"
"Please."
There were distant, kitchenlike noises, and Mycroft traced Lestrade's progress around his breakfast area by aural cues. Then the gentle chink of ceramic as Lestrade set down the tea. Mugs, rather than teacups, but easier and more comforting to maneuver. In his other hand was a wet flannel.
"Undo your top button?" Mycroft blinked at him. Lestrade gestured with the flannel. "For your neck."
Ah. Mycroft loosened his tie and unbuttoned the top two buttonholes, and then Greg's hand was on the back of his head, urging him to lean forward. Mycroft wanted those fingers to stay in his hair, but they moved, shifting his shirt collar out of the way, and the cool cloth was a sudden, shivering relief, down every nerve in his spine.
"Oh," came out less a word than a groan, and Mycroft's eyes slid shut and stayed that way, Lestrade's hand warm on his back. "You're being very kind."
Lestrade made a small, dismissive noise, full of masculine English inability to admit to kindness, and Mycroft felt himself nearly smile.
It was a fanciful, simplistic notion, that mint tea should taste like being cared for. But Mycroft, should he have made tea himself, would have chosen the ginger and chamomile blend. It was soothing. Effective. Proven self-care. Mint conveyed something different.
"Can you at least hope those gits holding the dinner will have gotten themselves poisoned as well?"
At that, Mycroft really did smile, enjoying the summary dismissal of certain important individuals as 'those gits'. And on reflection, the smile widened. "Actually, I believe I can. The most likely vector was the salad."
As if summoned, satanic-fashion, by the speaking of its name, the soft belch that escaped Mycroft's stomach carried a waft of salad across his palate, with notes of whiskey and acid.
"Oh, lord."
He burped again, and it came up liquid on the back of his tongue, made him swallow convulsively, hand hovering in front of his mouth.
Greg's hand was on his, closing it around something. Metal. Basin. Mycroft hadn't been sick in a basin since he was a child. He remembered holding one, for Sherlock. More than once. It was not an experience he envied his brother.
After a few moments in which nothing disastrous eventuated, he sat back, aware that his unfortunate complexion was probably giving away more than he would like. Lestrade settled gently onto the couch beside him, careful not to jar. Mycroft breathed.
"Do you know, I genuinely can't remember the last time I felt like this?" Not simply the incipient need to vomit, but the thick swelling waves of nausea that threatened to swamp higher brain function. Mycroft did not like feeling unable to think.
"Are you the type who feels better after you're sick, or the avoid it at all costs type?"
"I've not had sufficient practice to determine." Mycroft panted. "And I'm uncertain I'll be afforded the choice."
His jaw muscles rolled without conscious permission, and the sudden wetness of his mouth was lost in the vertiginous tidal swirl that twisted through him. He retched, gagging on a half-realised burp, and found that he was gripping the basin with one hand, and Lestrade's wrist with the other. Wetness hit the basin and pooled there, still threaded to his lip, and he heaved on the air, throat locking open.
He hung on that precipice for an eternity of seconds, distantly outside himself with embarrassment and wholly confined to the bodily, carnal, visceral upheaval that had taken hold.
He vomited.
The whiskey added to the acid burn, but worse than that he could still taste his supper in its resurgence, as though nothing had digested, simply marinated itself inside him into an awful, curdled soup -- something solid caught at the back of his throat, and he choked on it, and vomited again, harder, and felt it burn through his nose as he tried not to fall forward, not to lose his grip on the basin. It was warm, the metal of the basin, warm from his sickup, and the sensation made him heave again, gurgling and thick, and again, until he could finally spit and try to breathe.
Lestrade's hand was easy on his back, and Mycroft focused on the circles it made, slow and soothing. He let Lestrade take the basin from his hands, and replace it with a handkerchief - Lestrade's, not his own, and Mycroft blew his nose and blotted stinging eyes.
With his face buried in cotton, weathered and soft from a thousand washings, he did not see Lestrade move, only felt the cushions shift and then Lestrade's arm full around his shoulders, drawing him in. It is half bracing, half embrace, and Mycroft slipped his arm free to circle Lestrade's waist in turn, leaned into the touch without opening his eyes.
Quiescent clarity lay in the aftermath, incipient potentials unfurling as Mycroft regained the ability to think, even as mundanity reasserted itself. He blew his nose once more, and Lestrade took the basin to empty it, with one last squeeze of Mycroft's hand. A moment later Mycroft could hear the flush of the loo, the running of the bathroom tap.
The tea was no longer hot, but its pale mint warmth felt like the only thing his stomach could possibly handle. It chased some of the awful burn from his throat. It was a relief, for a moment, to be alone. To recover his composure without an audience. Yet part of that relief was grounded in the way he could still hear Lestrade. He was out of sight, but not gone, and Mycroft was simply recovering himself before they interacted further, not waiting out his sickness in an empty house, with no one to notice or care.
The soiled handkerchief he folded in on itself. The tea he sipped, slowly. His shoulders receded from their tension-induced position in the vicinity of his ears, and his stomach swirled, uncertain, but no longer in immediate revolt.
Lestrade returned to the doorway. Mycroft did not know what picture he must present- pale, but red from vomiting, sweaty and half-composed, but for all that all he could read in Lestrade's look was fond concern.
Surely it wasn't this easy.
And yet when he offered Lestrade to stay the night, if he chose, the "'course I will," was immediate.
And then followed, with less certainty: "Is this a guest room sort of invitation, or-"
Mycroft extended his hand to Greg, and let the other man pull him up to standing, until they swayed together, the whisper of space between them warm and intent.
"I rather think 'or'."