My beta-reader described this relationship as "creepy asexual lust". I feel you should be aware of that fact. (p.s. Mycroft Holmes is a creeper.)

"A Study in Grey"

The Inspector, of course, doesn't know what's going on.

It's not as though he should. Mycroft's particular brand of courtship isn't really designed to be inscrutable, but it inevitably turns out that way. There are simply so many factors to be considered - who might find out and what that might entail, what might be required of Lestrade in the event of his becoming aware, and of course the question of whether he would even return the affection-

So Mycroft has just silently doubled the amount of surveillance he keeps on Lestrade. If Lestrade is even aware of the cameras lovingly distributed throughout his flat, he's resigned enough to it that he's never mentioned it to anyone, though Mycroft is inclined to think he's ignorant. The Inspector's line of work, combined with the frequency of his interactions with Sherlock, gives Mycroft the convenient excuse of mere interest in his safety.

In the evenings, when he catches up on the film footage neatly recorded on his several computers, Mycroft watches Lestrade hang up his coat and unwind his scarf and set his gloves and keys down on his kitchen table. When Mycroft first started watching, Lestrade was married, but gradually his feeds began to include long arguments over money and children who hadn't been born and the dangers of unspooling the threads of murders, and in two years the divorce was final. Now Lestrade lives alone-the occasional girlfriend, but nothing permanent.

Mycroft leans back in his armchair, hands folded neatly, and watches Lestrade get a beer out of the fridge and uncap it deftly with the bottle opener. Lestrade has been getting greyer over the past few years; greyer hair, greyer clothes, a winter slowness in his time alone, the tiredness that settles over some men in middle age. It fascinates Mycroft.

Mycroft doesn't imagine himself ever slowing and greying that way. He isn't an active man in the physical sense, but he keeps busy.

But Lestrade comes home at the end of his work days and ceases to act with purpose. Mycroft watches as he unfastens the top few buttons of his shirt and drops into a worn chair, setting his beer aside to untie his shoes and shed them. He has a set pattern, one he probably has no awareness of, but Mycroft watches it every evening, so familiar by now with the script that he already knows that next Lestrade will lean back and close his eyes, run one hand through his hair and rub the back of his neck because it's stiff, sigh and turn on the television and watch it for somewhere between five and ten minutes before he gets up and makes himself dinner.

Another of Mycroft's gifts has been to ease Lestrade's way. He has influence in Scotland Yard - of course he does. He's opened the way to restricted evidence, closed off access to cases that might have led Lestrade too close to the secrets of his own government. It's all quite covert, subtle, behind the scenes, but Mycroft has always enjoyed being the person who arranges where the scenery will go, how the choreography is decided. He isn't an actor. He doesn't want to be.

But he likes to watch his plays.

His eyes follow the movements onscreen as Lestrade begins fixing himself something that looks rather proletarian (sausages and peas, as a matter of fact), scrapes it onto a chipped china plate with a plastic spoon. Lestrade's furnishings are a mixture of old worn things and convenience products, his furniture all badly in need of reupholstering and his cups mainly the plastic sort from the grocery. It has to do with that greying, Mycroft suspects. There are still things that earn bursts of energy from Lestrade, though - almost all of them his work.

Mycroft enjoys watching Lestrade at his work.

He has no understanding of love, not in the traditional sense. This business of flirtations and shared dinners and evenings at the cinema and exchanging potentially toxic bodily fluids with abandon is foreign to him, he doesn't like it. It's distasteful and leaves one vulnerable. But when he turns on his feeds in the evenings to watch Lestrade go about his unvarying routine, or happens to come across him in the course of one of Sherlock's investigations, a satisfaction always settles on him.

Lestrade settles back into his chair with his supper; he'll stay there for another hour at least, and Mycroft turns the feed over to Sherlock's flat: this particular camera probably has another two days before his brother discovers and dismantles it.

Sherlock is huddled around a microscope while the Doctor makes supper; Mycroft's lip curls. Such a domestic little scene. But at least it's been keeping Sherlock off the drugs, a fact the Doctor probably won't ever learn, if Sherlock's usual failure to communicate persists.

Mycroft doesn't envy his brother for anything. Sherlock's chaos, the squalor of his apartment, his childish temperament, his pettiness, and the surge of chemical compounds with kaleidoscopes of molecular structure that he pushes into his bloodstream through the sharp point of a hypodermic - the hallmarks of his life.

Mycroft doesn't envy him.

Not even when Sherlock unfolds his loose-limbed body from the kitchen chair and transfers it to the couch, staring at the ceiling reproachfully until the Doctor sits on the floor beside his knee. They talk, the Doctor in a warm undertone and Sherlock in bursts of petulance, but Mycroft is watching the byplay, the Doctor's hand settling on Sherlock's thigh reassuringly, and the way Sherlock slowly relaxes and quiets down.

Their touch is rarely more intimate than this - the occasional hand on shoulder, thigh to thigh in taxis, a hair closer than is ever strictly necessary, lasting a few ellipses of seconds longer than it would with anyone else Sherlock knows. To Mycroft, watching his brother share his hungry, lonely, taut-strung existence with another human being, it is all like the most graphic of sexual intercourse.

No one touches Mycroft.

The Doctor slowly rises, patting Sherlock's knee, and goes to get the tea out of the kitchen, and Mycroft changes his feed back to Lestrade, rolling the taste of discontent around in his mouth like a corn of pepper, unwilling to bite down on it and risk burning his tongue.

Lestrade is still sitting in his chair, finishing his supper, while the television plays Doctor Who. Mycroft considers, for a moment, what it would feel like to touch him. It's been so long since he's come into physical contact with anyone else - and that's to his taste - that he isn't entirely sure how to simulate the texture of skin and hair in his imagination. Lestrade would be - dry? cool?

He can classify easily what he feels for Lestrade as some kind of love - not Sherlock's kind, histrionic and begging for touch to ground it. Not like that of most of the people he watches, tawdry and full of passion. It is like himself. Observant. Existing subtly in the background where no one can see it but no one can choose not to be affected by it: he'll give Lestrade whatever he feels is fit, whatever that requires.

He watches as Lestrade finishes the episode and gets up, wandering into the kitchen to put his plate in the sink. Mycroft knows a thousand aspects of Lestrade's life from these past three years, knows how he sleeps and how he moves and how he goes about his work.

Sometimes he entertains his fantasies; but they're only that, only fantasies. Mycroft has no interest in more. The watching is enough.

(Quite enough; and the texture of skin is irrelevant when one considers all the bacteria that it carries with it, the way it sheds its cells continuously into the air, building thin pavements of dust onto the surface of things that should be perfectly clean. The mere image in a camera will never be unsanitary, nor will it ever jeopardise one's career, or cloud one's judgement, or compromise one's dignity. Nor will it make one risk one's life in a half-dark swimming pool, a white-faced hostage that renders one impotent.

And Mycroft is not his brother, nor will he ever be.)

He steeples his fingers, eyes still fixed on the screen. In approximately twenty-three minutes Anthea will come to tell him that the car is ready to take him home. In the meantime, Lestrade will sit at his table with a file of papers and his head propped in one hand, scanning data with tired eyes, and although Mycroft knows every movement in the sequence by heart, it won't do to miss it.

One never knows. Sherlock's mistake is that he always assumes he does, but Mycroft is wiser. Even the Doctor may someday surprise them.

Onscreen, Lestrade opens his file and starts to spread the papers out across his table.