Chapter Text
“It isn’t going to work,” said Sherlock, standing in the doorway of their bedroom and looking displeased.
“You can’t know that, you’re not a fortune-teller,” John told him, and retrieved a couple of jumpers from his drawer.
“No, but I am Sherlock Holmes and I have deduced—”
“You’re the world’s only consulting detective,” John interrupted him, zipping up the duffel bag, “and no one has asked you to consult. Or detect, for that matter.” He walked past him, into the lounge, taking the duffel bag with him.
“I don’t see why it’s your problem anyway,” said Sherlock, following him.
John picked up the train ticket where he’d left it on the desk. “Because I’m her older brother.”
Sherlock made an expression of distaste. “Older brothers always think they have to interfere in matters that are none of their business.”
“Oh, really?” John asked him, balefully. “The way Mycroft interferes in your business? Have you been experimenting on this apple?” He held it up for inspection.
“No,” Sherlock told him. And, “Yes, exactly like that.”
“The way Mycroft interfered by intervening and sending you to rehab when you needed it. That sort of interference.”
Sherlock narrowed his eyes. “Who told you that? It wouldn’t have been Mycroft; it had to have been Lestrade.”
John took a bite of the apple and then gestured at Sherlock with it. “Mycroft saved your life. That’s what older brothers do. That’s what I’m doing.” He pushed past him again, grabbing his jacket from the back of his chair as he went.
“Mycroft didn’t save my life,” Sherlock denied, impatiently. “I was fine.”
John paused at the top of the stairs, looking back at him. “You were addicted to cocaine. Which is no one’s definition of ‘fine.’”
“I wasn’t addicted to it,” said Sherlock, hotly, clearly offended by the implication. “I didn’t need it when the people around me weren’t being boring. How was that my fault?”
“You have one of the most addictive personalities I’ve ever encountered,” John told him. “You’re addicted to so many things, you make my head spin.”
“I am not,” said Sherlock, petulantly. “You won’t let me have any of it anymore. You and Mycroft.”
“I let you play around in crime scenes and run experiments all over the house, including on me, even when you don’t ask me for permission, which I really wish you would and you know I wish you would.”
“If I ask you for permission, it inevitably affects the outcome of the experiment. You’ve a background in science, think.”
“Yes. I am thinking. I have to go.”
“I don’t understand why the intervention couldn’t be in London,” Sherlock sulked.
“Because Harry doesn’t live in London.”
“Doesn’t she have a computer?”
“You don’t do an intervention via Skype, and I’m not talking to you about this anymore. Please stop being selfish for a little while; I think you can manage.”
“But you’re my current addiction,” Sherlock pointed out. “I’m going to suffer terrible withdrawal without you.”
“Ring Mycroft and see if he’ll pay for another fancy rehab,” said John, as he jogged down the stairs.
Sherlock frowned. “I am not the only one in this flat with an addictive personality, you know,” he called down the stairs to John.
“Oh, believe me, I know,” John said, as he pulled open the door. “I have no other explanation for why I would put up with you.”
***
Sherlock paced the lounge in a tight circle, his hands clasped behind his back. He paced with heavy footfalls. He was seeing how long it would take Mrs. Hudson to come up and check on him.
347 seconds. That was how long.
“Sherlock, you’re trampling like a herd of elephants.”
“Hardly, Mrs. Hudson,” he said, but he did stamp a bit harder, just because he could.
“John hasn’t even been gone an hour yet.”
“John has been gone 36 minutes,” Sherlock told her, “and I am dying of boredom.”
“Can’t you watch something on the telly?”
“On the telly?” Sherlock practically shrieked at her. “What would I watch on the telly?”
“I don’t know, Sherlock, you love yelling at those terrible talk shows.”
Sherlock scoffed. “Only when John’s here. What’s the point of yelling at them without an audience?” Honestly, people were so stupid that it pained him.
“I suppose I could sit here with you if it would help—”
“No, Mrs. Hudson, that would not help,” Sherlock snapped at her. As if Mrs. Hudson were an adequate substitute for John. As if anybody on the planet were an adequate substitute for John.
“You could play your violin,” Mrs. Hudson suggested.
“No, I couldn’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s boring.”
“You love your violin.”
“No, I don’t. It’s boring.”
“You play it all the time.”
“When John’s here, Mrs. Hudson. John is not here. Can’t you see that John’s not here? Surely even you can observe that John is not here. Look around this flat.” Sherlock gestured dramatically. “Tell me if you see John here. You do remember what he looks like? Short, with that little face.” Sherlock made a gesture with his hand that, to his eye, approximated John’s face. “Do you see anyone fitting that description here? Anywhere in this flat? Hiding behind a sofa, possibly? No. You do not. Conclusion: John is not here. John has been gone for 38 minutes now.” Sherlock collapsed dramatically onto the sofa. “I am going to die from how boring everything is.”
***
Lestrade’s mobile was flashing Mycroft’s number at him, and he lifted his index finger to interrupt what Colin was telling him and answered it, because Mycroft seldom phoned in the middle of the day without a purpose. “Hello,” he said, pleasantly.
“Are you busy?”
“Moderately. Did you need something?”
“To talk.”
Lestrade glanced out his window, at the black car idling within perfect view. “Give me two minutes,” he said, and hung up the phone and turned back to Colin. “It isn’t a bad theory,” he said to him, “but you’d need to explain the reason for our time of death estimate being off.”
“Well, that could be temperature, couldn’t it?”
“Do you have any reason to believe the temperature of the body was mucked about with?” Lestrade was pulling on his coat, because it was a drizzling unpleasant day and he’d got wet that morning coming into work and had been unable to shake the chill and he wanted a coat even if he was only going to dash out to Mycroft’s car.
“I feel like yes, I do, but I can’t put my finger on why that is.”
Lestrade had no problem with police work by hunch. He thought hunches were what people who weren’t Holmeses had to rely on. He thought they were moments of observation your subconscious had picked up on that your conscious hadn’t caught up to yet. Holmeses didn’t have those moments, but regular people did, and if Colin had a hunch, then Lestrade was willing to give him some leeway to chase it. “Go through the files again,” Lestrade told him. “Take note of anything that makes you uneasy.”
“Okay. Are you leaving for the day?” Colin looked only mildly curious, and it occurred to Lestrade he had become used to Lestrade dashing about and keeping strange hours.
“No, just a couple of minutes,” he promised, and left him in his office, heading outside and turning his collar up against the rain, thinking that maybe he’d take the file of the case Colin was talking about home that night and see why it wasn’t triggering any uneasy feelings in him. It was possible his subconscious had missed whatever Colin had seen.
Lestrade pulled open the door of Mycroft’s car and ducked happily into the warmth of the backseat.
“Here,” said Mycroft, and handed him an umbrella.
Lestrade was terrible about umbrellas. If he remembered to bring one in the morning, then he forgot to bring it home from work that night. Or he left it at a crime scene. He took the umbrella, but said, “I’m fine.”
“No, you’re not, you got damp this morning and you’ve been cold all day.”
“How do you know that?”
“Your posture is different when you’ve caught a chill. That’s the way you sit when you’re on the verge of making the fire too big at home.”
“Oh,” said Lestrade, because that did make sense.
“I have a favor to ask of you,” Mycroft told him, carefully.
The words sounded rusty in Mycroft’s mouth, which was unsurprising, since Mycroft seldom asked for favors.
“What is it?” asked Lestrade.
“My brother is going to need a case. Have you anything interesting?”
Lestrade sighed. “It would be lovely if you would come to see me at work and ask for a favor and the favor would be something deliciously naughty possibly involving partial nudity and the backseat of this car.”
Mycroft smiled briefly. “I’ll save that for next week.”
“Why does he need a case? We just finished a case. Just this morning you were saying how nice it was to see me over the breakfast table, and now you want me to go seek out another one of Sherlock’s cases.” Sherlock’s cases were never easy cases. They weren’t cases that let him get home for dinner and get full nights’ sleeps and have leisurely breakfasts. That was the point of them being Sherlock cases.
“I know,” said Mycroft, and he looked apologetic. “But John phoned me.”
“John phoned you?” Lestrade tried not to be hurt, because John almost always phoned Lestrade, even when it was really Mycroft he wanted to talk to.
Lestrade knew Mycroft noticed he was hurt, but was grateful Mycroft didn’t comment on it. Mycroft continued, “He’s going to see his sister. His sister’s current…” Mycroft considered what word to use, then waved his hand instead. “Thought it might be worthwhile to stage an intervention.”
“What a bloody mess,” said Lestrade, on a sigh. “Poor John. I wish it would take, this time. I wish you could give him some advice.”
“John is clever enough to have already grasped the advice I would have given him.”
“Which is?”
“That the only way to tamp down on one addiction is to provide another. You’ve conquered an addiction, wouldn’t you agree?”
He would, actually, it was why he’d developed a number of smaller habits when he’d first stopped smoking, trying to have something to do to fill the time when he would have been enjoying a cigarette.
Mycroft knew he would agree, so he didn’t wait for a response. “This means, of course, that my brother is currently alone in the flat.”
“And,” concluded Lestrade, “with access to one addiction thwarted, Sherlock will need access to another addiction. And you’d rather it be crime than anything else.”
“Yes.” Mycroft was solemn as he looked across at him. “Do you mind terribly?”
Yes, he minded, thought Lestrade. He liked his job a great deal, and he liked it best when it was being interesting, and that usually meant that his best days at work coincided with days when he was with Sherlock. But Sherlock was always trying and an effort and he’d just come off a case with Sherlock and he’d been looking forward to a day or two, at least, of recovery. Not everyone had the energy to deal with Sherlock Holmes constantly the way John seemed to.
“Not at all,” said Lestrade.
Mycroft surprised him by laughing. “You really are the worst liar I’ve ever met. I don’t understand why you even attempt it.”
“I don’t understand why you ask me questions you know I’m going to lie in response to,” Lestrade countered, a trifle irritated.
“I don’t want you to lie in response. If you mind, I’ll…” Mycroft trailed off.
Lestrade had no idea what Mycroft’s alternative plan was. He supposed Mycroft must have one, but he also supposed that Mycroft had depended on Lestrade’s affection for him to compel Lestrade to help. Which had been a safe bet on Mycroft’s part.
“I’ll find us something,” Lestrade told him. “Hopefully. How long do you think we have before things get dire?”
“One hour?” Mycroft guessed. “Possibly two?”
“I don’t understand how John deals with him. Then again, John doesn’t understand how I deal with you, so I suppose that makes us even.”
Mycroft looked startled. “How you deal with me?” he echoed.
Lestrade chuckled. “This conversation was worth it just for that look on your face right now.” He reached for the door handle.
Mycroft said, “Thank you. Really.”
“You owe me now.”
“Send me an invoice,” said Mycroft.
“Have Reynolds send me something for dinner. If I’m finding a case for Sherlock, I likely won’t be home.”
“Of course.”
Lestrade opened the door, and Mycroft said, “Greg, the umbrella.”
Lestrade turned back and reached for it and said, “Cheers,” before ducking back into the rain, but he didn’t even bother to put the umbrella up as he dashed back into New Scotland Yard. Mycroft would probably chide him for that, he thought.
He shook rain out of his hair and headed back to his office, feeling a bit sorry over having to tell Colin that they needed to find a good case somewhere and needed to resign themselves to working around the clock for a little while longer.
His mobile rang as he was walking, and he pulled it out and looked in disbelief at Sherlock’s number flashing up at him. “Seriously?” he said to the phone, and then answered it. “Yeah.”
“I need a case,” Sherlock clipped out to him.
“Already? How long has John been gone?”
“Did he phone you before he left? No. He wouldn’t have. He was angry with me, and phoning you would have been the nicer option, so he phoned Mycroft, who phoned you, and that’s excellent, because you should already have a case for me by now.” Sherlock sounded pleased.
“Brilliant deduction,” Lestrade told him, sweeping into his office and shrugging out of his coat. “Except that I don’t.”
“What? How? How can you be so incompetent as to not even be able to find me a case? I’m not asking you to solve it, I would never hold such a lofty notion for you, but now it is asking too much to request that you even find a case?”
Lestrade tossed his coat over the chair opposite his desk. “We just finished a case, Sherlock,” he reminded him. “I’ve been doing paperwork all day.”
“And laying low,” Sherlock concluded. “Boring.”
“Yes,” agreed Lestrade, sitting behind his desk. “Every once in a while, that doesn’t bother me.”
“Because you’re boring,” Sherlock told him.
“Thank you,” said Lestrade. “I love you, too.”
“I just need someone to murder someone else.”
“Keep being this annoying, and it’s possible that I can arrange that,” Lestrade remarked, dryly.
“Don’t be tedious,” said Sherlock. “Find me a case.”
“I’m working on it,” Lestrade replied, and then had the sneaking suspicion he was talking to dead air. “Sherlock?” No response.
Lestrade sighed and walked out to Colin’s desk. “We need a case,” he said, shortly. “A good one.”
“But I thought you said we were going to take it easy for a day or two.”
“I’ve changed my mind.”
“Is this about Sherlock?” asked Colin, on a sigh. Colin didn’t hate Sherlock with the passion with which Sally had hated Sherlock—that, frankly, would have been a difficult thing to equal—but Colin didn’t like Sherlock, which Lestrade didn’t blame him for, because almost nobody liked Sherlock. Sherlock ordered Colin around and generally terrified him in that way he had, so Lestrade understood Colin’s sigh of displeasure. Lestrade hated to say that he was half-grateful to Sherlock for being so impossible. Colin had stopped being terrified of Lestrade after having met someone genuinely terrifying in Sherlock.
“Yes,” he said. “So it needs to be a good case. Also, it is my advice that you avoid dating men who have annoying little brothers.”
“I don’t date men,” Colin replied, lightly. He had taken it in stride that Lestrade these days did, and a very odd man who Lestrade knew terrified Colin nearly as much as Sherlock. Mycroft was never anything other than polite to Colin when they ran across each other, which usually happened only when Mycroft stopped by New Scotland Yard, but Lestrade understood that a polite Mycroft was a good ten times more terrifying than a rude hooligan. Lestrade also wondered if Colin suspected that Mycroft had the power to transfer Colin in a heartbeat if he didn’t like something about him. Lestrade liked Colin well enough and had forbidden Mycroft to do anything of the sort, but Colin wasn’t an idiot and sometimes Mycroft made veiled threats about such things out of force of habit.
“The same applies to women,” Lestrade told him.
“I’ll keep that in mind. Thank you for the advice, sir.”
Lestrade made a wry gesture of no problem, don’t mention it, went back to his office, phoned Mycroft, and told him to send over good coffee, because Lestrade was not tackling Sherlock this time around with only bad coffee for assistance.
***
Colin asked him if he had any threes, and Lestrade told him to go fish, and Sherlock said from the doorway, “Go Fish? Are you playing Go Fish?”
Lestrade looked at him over his feet propped on his desk. Sherlock looked both shocked and disapproving, and he also looked as if he couldn’t decide where to frown—at Lestrade, at Colin, at their respective hands of cards, at the piles of matches in front of them, at the draw pile in the middle of Lestrade’s newly cleared desk. His frown flickered everywhere all at once.
Lestrade looked back at his hand and requested a six, which Colin handed over.
“Lestrade,” said Sherlock, plainly furious at being ignored. “What are you doing?”
“You already deduced what I’m doing,” remarked Lestrade, putting his pair of sixes into his pile of matches. “Have you got a seven?”
“Go fish,” said Colin.
Lestrade leaned over and drew a three and filed that away to request of Colin at the next hand. “What are you doing here?” he asked Sherlock.
“I came to see if you had found a case yet.” Sherlock stalked into his office. “And it’s a good thing I came, because it’s clear that, instead of doing anything approximating your job, you are busy playing a child’s card game.”
“Colin, what are you looking for?” Lestrade asked him, calmly, because Colin was staring at Sherlock’s frankly spectacular display of pique.
“Uh,” said Colin, and glanced at his hand. “A queen?”
“Go fish,” Lestrade answered.
“You should ask him for an eight and a two, and he’s still got that three that you just picked up on your last draw,” Sherlock told Lestrade, unabashedly studying Colin’s hand.
“Sherlock,” said Lestrade in annoyance, and tossed his hand on his desk.
“Good. Go find me a case.”
“We’re trying to find you a case. There haven’t been any calls. Also, Gregson wants to know why he doesn’t get to get anything interesting anymore because I pounce on all of them, so there are Scotland Yard politics going on at the moment.”
“Politics,” snorted Sherlock. “That’s a big word for such a petty disagreement.”
“Says the king of petty actions,” Lestrade pointed out. “You are more than welcome to work with Gregson if you want. I won’t be jealous.”
“I can’t work with Gregson,” Sherlock told him. “And you would be jealous.”
Which was maybe a little bit true, and that was annoying, and Lestrade frowned at him. “Colin, can you go around asking very nicely and see if anybody has anything for us yet?”
“Yes, sir,” said Colin, and scurried out of the office.
Sherlock leaned against the window to the rest of the station and watched Colin’s progress, saying as he did so, “Look at you. What would Mycroft say?”
“About what?”
Sherlock looked at him and lifted an eyebrow. “Playing Go Fish?”
“Sometimes you feel like a chess game, sometimes you feel like Go Fish.”
“Mycroft never feels like playing Go Fish,” said Sherlock with certainty.
Which, Lestrade conceded, was probably true. “Didn’t you ever play it as boys?”
“You think we played card games together?” Sherlock asked, sounding pitying of Lestrade’s deep stupidity. He looked back out at the station. “Gregson hates me.”
“Most people hate you.”
“What happened to Donovan? Did Mycroft have her killed?”
“Transferred.”
“That’s practically the first intelligent thing my brother has ever done,” said Sherlock, and sat in the chair Colin had just vacated, picking up Colin’s hand of cards. “Give me the three you have,” he said. “And also the ace. And the two. Oh, look, I’ve won.”
“It now becomes clear to me why you and Mycroft never play card games.”
Colin came back up to the office doorway. “Gregson said…that he didn’t have any cases.”
“Thank you for censoring that,” said Lestrade, wryly.
“No cases. All right, then,” said Sherlock. “What should we do instead?”
Lestrade blinked at him. “I’m sorry, what?”
“Hasn’t Mycroft asked you to keep me occupied? If you’re not going to find me a case, what are we going to do instead?”
“Nothing,” said Lestrade. “I’m not your baby-sitter.”
“Mmmm, could have fooled me,” said Sherlock and stood energetically. “Colin!” he exclaimed.
Colin jumped, startled, and looked at him warily. “What?”
“You have a theory about something. An old case. Well, older. One I wasn’t around for, possibly? Yes, that’s it, isn’t it?” Sherlock looked at Lestrade. “An unsolved case you didn’t share with me?”
Lestrade shook his head. “Solved. We had a confession.”
“But?”
“Tell him, Colin,” said Lestrade, because he was curious as to the outcome of this and he thought it would be good for Colin to have to defend a theory against Sherlock Holmes’s scrutiny. Sherlock was obnoxious, but he did keep you at the top of your game.
“I don’t think it feels right,” Colin said, after a moment.
Sherlock narrowed his eyes at Colin. “Show me the files,” he commanded.
“Hang on,” Lestrade said, even as Colin turned to obey Sherlock. Sherlock looked at him. “How did you know he had a theory at all?”
Sherlock gave him an oh, please look.
“Fine,” Lestrade relented. “You can go with Colin to the file room, but you’re not to leave Colin’s sight and you’re to come back here in twenty minutes’ time. Look both ways before you cross any streets and hold Colin’s hand.” He tried to do it straight-faced, but he couldn’t quite pull it off.
“Shut up,” said Sherlock, sourly, but there was a bit of a spring in his step as he followed Colin to the file room.
Lestrade grinned and shuffled the deck of cards and laid out a game of solitaire on his desk.