PROLOGUE - a tease for the birthday of my very good friend and inspiration, Edhla, who walks around on her head for much of her life - can't be good for you - come over here, honey, to rest your brain the right way up!
A tease, as I've said I'll write this story and, so far, have written a prologue...
So, my lovely, your present is mostly a promise, or several:
to write the Turkish Monk Mission; to rewrite the Packer as a full story; to write further scenes in some of my older stories and generally to write fuller stories in future.
Happy Birthday, honey.

If you'd met Mycroft Holmes, at the same time as Dr John Watson did, you could be forgiven for believing that he didn't exist outside of the orbit of his home, his office and the Diogenes Club.

It hadn't always been so, however. Mycroft had been one of the finest field operatives of his generation and a man with more conspicuous emotions than the one that Dr Watson met so many years later. Mycroft's upbringing had a lot to do with his control over his feelings, but it was his early experiences in the service of HRH that hardened him so considerably.

Whether he had neutralised his young apprentice because he had been given a direct order, because it was the right thing to do in the circumstances or because he could no longer stand to hear her screams, even Mycroft was not sure. Maybe one of those, maybe all three of them, maybe none of them at all. One thing was for certain, she was not going to stand up to another session of torture and it would jeopardise the whole mission to try to get her out.

That wasn't the point when he retired from active service though. Two more years after the Turkish Monk Mission he'd lasted. Two grueling years that felt like torture to him, though he knew not due the amount of screaming. So he moved from being an active field operative to someone who send them to their inevitable doom. The life expectancy of anyone under Mycroft Holmes did terrible things to the national statistics - He was not highly thought of by Jil Matheson.

But this story is not about the refined leader of men, but the slightly reckless and self-important Mycroft at the beginning of his career.