I am not lonely [Mystrade]

CHAPTER 163 : Just a few words.

Mycroft was sat with his son on his lap, a massive photo album opened in  front of them, on the coffee table. The pictures, carefully fixed,  sorted out and labelled showed a young Gregory in every position you could think of.  He had been, and was still, a very handsome boy with his black curly  hair and his naughty smirk and every time he would open the album, the  official would fall a little more in love with his partner. What would  he have given to have had the chance of meeting the teenager when himself was younger ? How much he would have dreamt about him at night ?

He tried to keep the naughty thought out of his mind and focused back on his son. The little boy was pretty much seeking a better understanding of his family since a few weeks and both his fathers were trying  their best to provide him with informations. The politician had just  remembered the existence of this album as he was looking for an old pair  of shoes in his closet.

The  leather bonded album had been given to him by the detective when they  had made their relationship official more than four years ago now. It  was a very symbolic gift to make, as if Greg had handled his past to his  boyfriend, as if they had known each other forever. The elder Holmes  had been caught off guard by this precious present, and he remembered  very well spending the following night looking over and over and over  again to the pictures as if he had wished to engraved them profoundly in his mind, not to ever forget about the man's smirk and his dandy look.

"Am I going to look like Papa when I'll grow up ?" Alden interrupted his father thoughts.

"Hmm ? Oh, maybe yes." the man quickly replied in a smile. "Do you like how he looks ?"

"I like his hairs." the boy nodded enthusiastically.

"Well, I suppose you could get that type of haircut if you wanted to." the elder Holmes approved, running a hand in his son's scalp. "But I fear that you will have to do with your hair colour otherwise."

"Why do I have the same hair colour than you ?" the child wondered, looking a little bothered.

"That I don't know ... Nature sometime is quite tricky you know." the official shredded.

Even if they had always been honest with him about the fact that they weren't his biological parents, none of the men were able to make in understand that he shared no genes with them and that everything from his eye colour to his body shape was as much of a wonder to them than it was to him.  He was probably a little too young to understand such complex things  and the fact that he was looking just like the Mycroft he had seen on  the rare pictures they possessed of him at the same age. After all, he  had plenty of time to get to understand that the elder Holmes thought as  he closed the album n front of him.

"Do you want to see something you've never seen ?" the man asked his son, winking at him.

The little boy nodded frantically, looking at his father with surprise.

"Go to my office and open the safe. You'll find a little red box. Take it and bring it back." the official directed him as he was helping him reach the floor. "The code of the safe is 3295."

Alden  rushed out of the living room to the study, going straight to the  painting he knew was hiding the massive vault of his father. He climbed  on the trunk right under it and left the painting, unveiling the black door of the safe. He tried to enter the code but failed one first time.

The politician, in the living room was pouring himself a glass of brandy when he heard the characteristic  sound of the vault's alarm. With a sad smile, he put the glass done on a  coffee table and made his way to the little room. He just had to use  the security key.

Where had he put that bloody key, he couldn't  tell but, as he was looking for it, Mycroft realised that his home's  study could do with a good clean up. He always had forbidden his house  keepers from coming into the room and had only let Michael take care of  the general cleaning and dusting. But after more than twenty years in  the place, it was becoming clear to the politician that he would need to  do something to sort that situation out if he didn't want something terrible to happen. After all, that lost key was a good illustration of what was going on.