he ain't heavy, he's my brother

The Holmes siblings did not, as a general rule, observe one another's birthdays. Christmas might merit a phone call in a good year; occasionally something would turn up on Bastille Day or after a particularly bizarre case or political scandal. Sarcasm always featured heavily. Whatever remarks were tossed back and forth tended either to contain so much cutting wit as to cancel out any grain of underlying sentiment, or to be outright scathing.

One might imagine, having observed these two brothers before one of them had fallen from grace and a hospital roof, that they hated each other. And one might imagine that hadn't changed when the younger brother rose from the grave in a proverbial blaze of glory.

But what no one was privy to was the contents of the package that slid through Mycroft Holmes's mail slot on an overcast Saturday.