The Mysterious Case of Sherlock's Boyfriend (1/1)
Title: The Mysterious Case of Sherlock’s Boyfriend
Characters: John/Sherlock, Mycroft, Lestrade, Donovan, Anderson
Word Count: 2,900
Beta: swissmarg Thank you so much!
Author's Notes: Inspired by a kink meme prompt.
Summary: Clearly, there's something terribly wrong with the freak's new boyfriend.
“A boyfriend?” Lestrade was only half-listening to the gossip among his underlings, but the word jolted his attention away from his paperwork. He fixed Donovan with a look, frowning as he waited for more information.
She shrugged. “Apparently the freak’s got himself one,” she said, managing to sound simultaneously amazed and dismissive. “How long you think it’ll last?” She turned the question to Anderson, who responded with a smirk.
“Two weeks?”
Donovan scoffed. “Who could put up with that for two weeks? I give it two hours. Hell, I give ‘til the first time he opens his mouth.”
“I suppose it would depend on what he was doing with his mouth,” Anderson began with a grimacing smile, but Lestrade shut him down with a look.
“Excuse me,” he cut in, irritated. “Don’t we have work to do?” He glanced back and forth between the pair before allowing his gaze to settle on Donovan. “You should give him more credit,” he continued, softening his tone. “I think he deserves a little credit.”
“He does,” she agreed without hesitation, catching Anderson’s eye as she returned to her computer screen. “Anyone willing to admit that he’s the freak’s boyfriend? I give him all the credit in the world.”
Lestrade sighed, but dropped it.
He did, after all, have work to do.
--
Lestrade was a bit surprised when Sherlock turned up at their crime scene with the boyfriend in tow.
It took him a while to figure out who the man was, because of course Sherlock couldn’t be bothered with anything as mundane as introductions. As for the boyfriend, he hung back and said almost nothing, but listened to every word Sherlock rattled off and watched him with admiration on his pleasant but rather plain face.
“This’ll end in tears,” Donovan noted to no one in particular, her eyes skipping between Sherlock and the stranger until Lestrade made the connection.
“Huh?” Lestrade began, before amending that to, “Oh.” And then, “Oh!” because he realized he was going to have to explain to Sherlock that a crime scene wasn’t an appropriate venue for a date. He really wasn’t looking forward to that conversation -- but then Sherlock appeared beside him, rattling off every last detail he’d discerned in the last few minutes and distracting him completely.
“Really,” Sherlock finished with disgust. “There was no reason to call me here.”
“Well, it was your choice to show up,” Lestrade pointed out, but that fact only deepened Sherlock’s displeasure.
He looked ready to launch into one of his diatribes about Lestrade’s intellectual shortcomings when the boyfriend appeared at his side and cleared his throat. Sherlock’s mouth instantly snapped shut as he wrapped an arm around his his shoulders, pulling him close. He was in the middle of pressing a kiss against his temple when the man nudged him with an elbow and cleared his throat again. Insistently, this time.
“Oh,” Sherlock said, looking back to Lestrade with profound boredom - a look that paired oddly with his suddenly bright eyes. “Lestrade. This is my partner, John Watson. John, this is Detective Inspector Lestrade, who really should have known better than to have--”
“Nice to meet you,” John said, stepping forward and offering his hand. His handshake was firm, his palm warm and dry. “I wish it had been under more pleasant conditions--”
“Like an actual murder,” Sherlock said, but John ignored him.
“Perhaps we could get together for coffee sometime? Or tea. I’d invite you to our place, but the kitchen, well…”
Lestrade needed no elaboration. He still wasn’t entirely over the time he’d mistakenly opened Sherlock’s icebox. “That’d be nice,” he said, picking his words carefully and at the same time wondering why. If this man was Sherlock’s partner, then he had a remarkably high tolerance for ill-chosen words.
John smiled at him, paying no attention to Sherlock’s sullen expression. “I’ve been looking forward to meeting a few of his friends,” he continued, as if the two were at a cocktail party and not in the middle of a crime scene, penned in by yellow tape and illuminated with flashing lights. He seemed set to go on, but Sherlock grabbed him around the middle again with both arms.
“Except right now we’re leaving,” Sherlock informed Lestrade. “We were in the middle of something. You interrupted.”
John rolled his eyes and smiled pleasantly. “Another time,” he said.
He might have added more, but Sherlock was practically dragging him off towards a waiting taxi cab.
“Huh,” Lestrade said, watching as Sherlock tucked John into the car and shut the door for him.
“Yeah,” Donovan agreed as she materialized at his side. “If you could put him on mute, it’d be almost like he was human.”
--
Much to his surprise, he got a call from the boyfriend a week or two later.
“You may or may not believe this,” John said without preamble, “but I’ve secured the kitchen. There’s nothing dead, rotting, or growing in there. Even the laboratory equipment has been temporarily relocated.”
Lestrade paused while visualizing the kitchen at 221B the last time he’d seen it. His own recommendation for improvement would have included fire and salt. “That’s… quite an accomplishment.”
“You have no idea,” John said, laughing good-naturedly. “So: tea? Sherlock says that you’re not to dare step foot inside our flat without a real case for us, but don’t concern yourself. I know how to handle him.”
Lestrade did his best not to visualise that. “Saturday? I have a few hours free Saturday afternoon. I can… pop over for a short visit.”
A visit with Sherlock. And his boyfriend.
He doubted that would ever stop seeming surreal.
“Oh, good,” the boyfriend in question replied. “See you then.”
--
“So, tell us!”
Lestrade was already regretting mentioning his visit with Sherlock and John. He should have known that the state of Sherlock’s affairs would be more interesting to his staff than the string of break-ins they were investigating.
“There’s not much to tell,” he said while turning on his computer and frowning at the emails that immediately started pouring into his inbox. One of these days, he was going to get smart and stop answering them. “They were… sweet.”
“Sweet?” Donovan, Anderson, and several lurking bystanders echoed his word back to him in unified disbelief.
Lestrade nodded, keeping his eyes fixed on his screen. “Sherlock thanked him for serving tea. There were biscuits, and milk that wasn’t expired. They sat together on the couch, and Sherlock held his hand the entire time. They even kissed, and didn’t seem to care that I was looking right at them.”
Donovan’s mouth had fallen open. “So, what - is the boyfriend some sort of homeless person with nowhere else to go?” She paused to consider her deduction before nodding to herself. “I bet the freak picked him up off the street and the poor man’s so grateful he’s willing to put up with anything. Even living with a psychopath.”
Lestrade finally dragged his gaze away from the monitor, his fingers paused above the keys. “No, actually. John’s a doctor.”
Donovan made a triumphant sound in the back of her throat. “That explains it. Sherlock’s using him to steal body parts or pharmaceuticals. I hope you’re planning to warn him.”
Lestrade shook his head and began typing. “No,” he said after a moment or two. “I think it’s even stranger than that.” He finished his email before looking up again, momentarily enjoying having so much attention focused on him and everyone waiting on what he was about to say next.
He wondered if that’s what it was like for Sherlock and his deductions.
“It’s even stranger,” he repeated, fighting back a smile. “I think they’re in love.”
--
Of course no one believed him.
--
He really did have work to do. Endless quantities of work, and the worst kind - the kind that, upon completion, merely generated more questions, more inquiries, more paperwork. Sometimes, he wondered if he’d chosen the right career.
Once again, he had to stay late in order not to begin the next day swamped with tedium, and by half-eight he was struggling to keep his eyes focused. He was considering bailing on the rest and heading home when the door to his office flew open and Sherlock Holmes loomed over his desk.
“Don’t start,” Lestrade said, returning his eyes to the papers spread across his desk. “It’s not like I’m holding out on you. There just hasn’t been anything interesting in months - which is a good thing, when you think about it. Means we’re winning, right?”
Ignoring his words completely, Sherlock dropped both hands onto his desk and leaned into his line of sight. “Call her off,” he said, his voice low with fury. “If you ever want my help again, call her off.”
“What?” Recoiling from Sherlock’s expression in spite of his best efforts, Lestrade leaned back into his chair and attempted to discern what he was on about. “Call… who?”
“Donovan,” Sherlock snapped, as if it were the most obvious answer ever - and after a moment’s consideration, Lestrade decided that it probably was.
“Okay,” he said, fighting for patience. “What’s she done?” By the time he’d uttered the words he’d figured it out, but it was too late to take the question back or fend off Sherlock’s anger.
“You know very well what she’s done, and I won’t have it. Her, upsetting John. Did you know that he’s a war veteran?” He didn’t pause long enough for Lestrade to answer. “Invalided out. He’s recovering, and I won’t have her setting him back!”
Lestrade nodded, very slowly and agreeably. “I understand,” he said, pitching his voice low, much as he would if addressing a rampaging beast with sights on his throat. “I didn’t know she’d planned to say anything to your… to John, but I suppose I could have guessed.” Yawning, he pushed aside a pile of paperwork and reached for his briefcase.
Unfortunately, Sherlock misinterpreted. “Oh, I’m sorry,” he said, his voice brimming with sarcasm. “Am I boring you? Are John’s combat-related stress disorder and panic attacks not important enough to--”
“Sherlock,” Lestrade interrupted, holding up a hand. “Calm down, I’m just tired is all, and I promise I’ll talk to her. Whatever happened, it won’t happen again.”
That seemed to mollify him, at least enough to halt further accusations or potential damage to his desk. “Not if you ever expect my help again,” Sherlock repeated, and this time the threat fully registered.
“Do you mean that?” Lestrade cocked his head to one side, curious. “You’d stop assisting with our most challenging cases, the ones that no one else has a clue what to do with if one of my staff…” He paused to find the right word, but really, he wanted to know: “…if one of my subordinates teases your boyfriend?”
Sherlock glared, but Lestrade knew him well enough to detect a trace of embarrassment beneath his anger.
He crossed his arms over his chest and smiled while leaning back in his chair. “So I was right about the two of you,” he said, allowing himself a bit of smug satisfaction.
Sherlock turned and swept out without asking for clarification.
Lestrade didn’t bother hiding his smile.
--
Lestrade had a few words with Donovan, but there was no danger that she’d take up tormenting John Watson as a hobby. She’s already said her piece and as she pointed out, it was nothing that Sherlock hadn’t declared for himself.
“Seems only fair,” she said. “If I was dating a man who called himself a sociopath, I’d want someone to tell me. In fact, I’d be irked if no one did. ‘Specially if I wound up dead in a ditch.”
He couldn’t argue with that. Well, he could, but Lestrade figured he’d had enough pointless discussions recently.
--
He called John a few days later to apologise, but John wouldn’t hear it.
“It’s not a problem,” he said. “You know how he gets.”
“True.” Lestrade thought for a moment. “Actually, no. I don’t. I mean, I know how he gets with boring cases and average people, but I don’t know how he is with a… with a partner.”
“Ah.” There was a slight pause before John continued. “I figured that with you having known him five years, well…” He cleared his throat a little. “But I suppose I’m the first war veteran he’s been involved with, and that makes it different. Remind him I was in Afghanistan next time you talk, eh? If I can survive that, I can handle random people reminding me that he’s… different.”
He laughed and after a slight pause, Lestrade joined him.
“I might not be Sherlock when it comes to deduction,” John finished, “but even I couldn’t have missed that.”
--
He never joined in on the betting for how long Sherlock’s relationship would last, but if he had, his estimate wouldn’t have been far off from Donovan’s - and they both would have been wrong. Months passed, and the happy couple remained both coupled and apparently quite happy.
He spotted them at a pub one evening, sitting close, their fingers woven together. Sherlock was talking non-stop - no surprise there - but he was also smiling, his eyes warm as he regarded his companion.
Another time, Lestrade nearly collided with them as they walked down the street outside the Yard. Sherlock had his arm around John’s shoulders and swiftly pulled him out of Lestrade’s path before impact. As Lestrade apologised, Sherlock glared.
“Quite all right,” John told them both before settling his eyes on Lestrade’s face. “In a hurry? Anything interesting?”
As it turned out, the case was interesting enough, and John’s medical expertise helped fit the final pieces together.
--
Lestrade had almost come around to Donovan’s assessment of Sherlock’s relationship - that John was somehow damaged and stuck with Sherlock because he had few other options - when he encountered the two of them at Bart’s, bickering with each other, a corpse sprawled on a table between them while Molly looked on with a helpless air.
“Absolutely not,” John told Sherlock, his gaze steely as he crossed his arms over his chest. “You have more than enough body parts at home. Whatever you’re going to do with these, you can do it here.”
Sherlock huffed out an exasperated sound. Lestrade couldn’t see his face from where he lingered in the hallway, but he had no doubt he was wearing one of his most vexed expressions. “You haven’t even asked what I need them for!”
John’s eyes narrowed into slits. “That’s because I don’t care what you need them for. They stay here. Whatever you need to do with them, you’ll do it here.”
“But this will take days! I need to write up my observations every twenty minutes for the next sixty-three hours or the whole thing is pointless.”
John gave a little shrug. “You’ll be staying for the next sixty-three hours, then,” he said, zipping up his jacket with a single decisive stroke. “Molly, if he tries to sneak anything out of here under his coat, you have my permission to shoot him.”
Lestrade jolted at that, but then Molly and John were laughing together while Molly fired a syringe filled with water near Sherlock’s feet. “Doctor’s orders,” she said, sounding far more relaxed than usual. Perhaps she should have been armed all along.
Sherlock grumbled, but much to Lestrade’s amazement, didn’t launch into a low estimation of their probable combined IQs or bemoan his lot in life, having to share breath with such inferior beings. “Fine,” he snapped instead, returning to the table and reaching inside the corpse’s chest. “But don’t bother sending any of those suggestive text messages this time. I won’t be responding. In fact, I’m going to turn off my mobile entirely.”
“Mmm,” John said, smiling a bit as he leaned in to brush his lips across Sherlock’s, and Lestrade decided to hurry down the hallway before he was caught spying. Besides, he’d already seen enough to set his mind at ease. Whatever John Watson was, he certainly wasn’t Sherlock’s hapless thrall.
He waited until John had been gone for at least ten minutes before returning to the room and giving Sherlock the good news: another gruesome murder, another puzzle that could likely only be solved by him.
--
The next time he saw them, they’d been called to the site of a kidnapping. The target was young and wealthy, which made a speedy resolution imperative, which in turn made calling Sherlock Holmes a necessity.
After Sherlock deduced that the teenage girl hadn’t been kidnapped after all and had, in fact, run off with her foreign-born lover, he tugged John against a car (okay, Lestrade’s car) and began kissing him with a sort of languid pleasure that suggested he’d forgotten the existence of the rest of the world. Lestrade watched for a moment before looking away, unable to shake the feeling that the street now somehow belonged to the two of them and he was intruding.
When he looked in the opposite direction, he found himself making eye contact with Mycroft Holmes, of all people.
“Turns out, she wasn’t kidnapped,” he began after taking just a beat to compose himself, but Mycroft didn’t appear to be listening. Instead, his eyes were on Sherlock and John.
“This,” he said with a sigh, addressing no one in particular, “will end in tears.”
But Lestrade was no longer so sure of that.
Characters: John/Sherlock, Mycroft, Lestrade, Donovan, Anderson
Word Count: 2,900
Beta: swissmarg Thank you so much!
Author's Notes: Inspired by a kink meme prompt.
Summary: Clearly, there's something terribly wrong with the freak's new boyfriend.
“A boyfriend?” Lestrade was only half-listening to the gossip among his underlings, but the word jolted his attention away from his paperwork. He fixed Donovan with a look, frowning as he waited for more information.
She shrugged. “Apparently the freak’s got himself one,” she said, managing to sound simultaneously amazed and dismissive. “How long you think it’ll last?” She turned the question to Anderson, who responded with a smirk.
“Two weeks?”
Donovan scoffed. “Who could put up with that for two weeks? I give it two hours. Hell, I give ‘til the first time he opens his mouth.”
“I suppose it would depend on what he was doing with his mouth,” Anderson began with a grimacing smile, but Lestrade shut him down with a look.
“Excuse me,” he cut in, irritated. “Don’t we have work to do?” He glanced back and forth between the pair before allowing his gaze to settle on Donovan. “You should give him more credit,” he continued, softening his tone. “I think he deserves a little credit.”
“He does,” she agreed without hesitation, catching Anderson’s eye as she returned to her computer screen. “Anyone willing to admit that he’s the freak’s boyfriend? I give him all the credit in the world.”
Lestrade sighed, but dropped it.
He did, after all, have work to do.
--
Lestrade was a bit surprised when Sherlock turned up at their crime scene with the boyfriend in tow.
It took him a while to figure out who the man was, because of course Sherlock couldn’t be bothered with anything as mundane as introductions. As for the boyfriend, he hung back and said almost nothing, but listened to every word Sherlock rattled off and watched him with admiration on his pleasant but rather plain face.
“This’ll end in tears,” Donovan noted to no one in particular, her eyes skipping between Sherlock and the stranger until Lestrade made the connection.
“Huh?” Lestrade began, before amending that to, “Oh.” And then, “Oh!” because he realized he was going to have to explain to Sherlock that a crime scene wasn’t an appropriate venue for a date. He really wasn’t looking forward to that conversation -- but then Sherlock appeared beside him, rattling off every last detail he’d discerned in the last few minutes and distracting him completely.
“Really,” Sherlock finished with disgust. “There was no reason to call me here.”
“Well, it was your choice to show up,” Lestrade pointed out, but that fact only deepened Sherlock’s displeasure.
He looked ready to launch into one of his diatribes about Lestrade’s intellectual shortcomings when the boyfriend appeared at his side and cleared his throat. Sherlock’s mouth instantly snapped shut as he wrapped an arm around his his shoulders, pulling him close. He was in the middle of pressing a kiss against his temple when the man nudged him with an elbow and cleared his throat again. Insistently, this time.
“Oh,” Sherlock said, looking back to Lestrade with profound boredom - a look that paired oddly with his suddenly bright eyes. “Lestrade. This is my partner, John Watson. John, this is Detective Inspector Lestrade, who really should have known better than to have--”
“Nice to meet you,” John said, stepping forward and offering his hand. His handshake was firm, his palm warm and dry. “I wish it had been under more pleasant conditions--”
“Like an actual murder,” Sherlock said, but John ignored him.
“Perhaps we could get together for coffee sometime? Or tea. I’d invite you to our place, but the kitchen, well…”
Lestrade needed no elaboration. He still wasn’t entirely over the time he’d mistakenly opened Sherlock’s icebox. “That’d be nice,” he said, picking his words carefully and at the same time wondering why. If this man was Sherlock’s partner, then he had a remarkably high tolerance for ill-chosen words.
John smiled at him, paying no attention to Sherlock’s sullen expression. “I’ve been looking forward to meeting a few of his friends,” he continued, as if the two were at a cocktail party and not in the middle of a crime scene, penned in by yellow tape and illuminated with flashing lights. He seemed set to go on, but Sherlock grabbed him around the middle again with both arms.
“Except right now we’re leaving,” Sherlock informed Lestrade. “We were in the middle of something. You interrupted.”
John rolled his eyes and smiled pleasantly. “Another time,” he said.
He might have added more, but Sherlock was practically dragging him off towards a waiting taxi cab.
“Huh,” Lestrade said, watching as Sherlock tucked John into the car and shut the door for him.
“Yeah,” Donovan agreed as she materialized at his side. “If you could put him on mute, it’d be almost like he was human.”
--
Much to his surprise, he got a call from the boyfriend a week or two later.
“You may or may not believe this,” John said without preamble, “but I’ve secured the kitchen. There’s nothing dead, rotting, or growing in there. Even the laboratory equipment has been temporarily relocated.”
Lestrade paused while visualizing the kitchen at 221B the last time he’d seen it. His own recommendation for improvement would have included fire and salt. “That’s… quite an accomplishment.”
“You have no idea,” John said, laughing good-naturedly. “So: tea? Sherlock says that you’re not to dare step foot inside our flat without a real case for us, but don’t concern yourself. I know how to handle him.”
Lestrade did his best not to visualise that. “Saturday? I have a few hours free Saturday afternoon. I can… pop over for a short visit.”
A visit with Sherlock. And his boyfriend.
He doubted that would ever stop seeming surreal.
“Oh, good,” the boyfriend in question replied. “See you then.”
--
“So, tell us!”
Lestrade was already regretting mentioning his visit with Sherlock and John. He should have known that the state of Sherlock’s affairs would be more interesting to his staff than the string of break-ins they were investigating.
“There’s not much to tell,” he said while turning on his computer and frowning at the emails that immediately started pouring into his inbox. One of these days, he was going to get smart and stop answering them. “They were… sweet.”
“Sweet?” Donovan, Anderson, and several lurking bystanders echoed his word back to him in unified disbelief.
Lestrade nodded, keeping his eyes fixed on his screen. “Sherlock thanked him for serving tea. There were biscuits, and milk that wasn’t expired. They sat together on the couch, and Sherlock held his hand the entire time. They even kissed, and didn’t seem to care that I was looking right at them.”
Donovan’s mouth had fallen open. “So, what - is the boyfriend some sort of homeless person with nowhere else to go?” She paused to consider her deduction before nodding to herself. “I bet the freak picked him up off the street and the poor man’s so grateful he’s willing to put up with anything. Even living with a psychopath.”
Lestrade finally dragged his gaze away from the monitor, his fingers paused above the keys. “No, actually. John’s a doctor.”
Donovan made a triumphant sound in the back of her throat. “That explains it. Sherlock’s using him to steal body parts or pharmaceuticals. I hope you’re planning to warn him.”
Lestrade shook his head and began typing. “No,” he said after a moment or two. “I think it’s even stranger than that.” He finished his email before looking up again, momentarily enjoying having so much attention focused on him and everyone waiting on what he was about to say next.
He wondered if that’s what it was like for Sherlock and his deductions.
“It’s even stranger,” he repeated, fighting back a smile. “I think they’re in love.”
--
Of course no one believed him.
--
He really did have work to do. Endless quantities of work, and the worst kind - the kind that, upon completion, merely generated more questions, more inquiries, more paperwork. Sometimes, he wondered if he’d chosen the right career.
Once again, he had to stay late in order not to begin the next day swamped with tedium, and by half-eight he was struggling to keep his eyes focused. He was considering bailing on the rest and heading home when the door to his office flew open and Sherlock Holmes loomed over his desk.
“Don’t start,” Lestrade said, returning his eyes to the papers spread across his desk. “It’s not like I’m holding out on you. There just hasn’t been anything interesting in months - which is a good thing, when you think about it. Means we’re winning, right?”
Ignoring his words completely, Sherlock dropped both hands onto his desk and leaned into his line of sight. “Call her off,” he said, his voice low with fury. “If you ever want my help again, call her off.”
“What?” Recoiling from Sherlock’s expression in spite of his best efforts, Lestrade leaned back into his chair and attempted to discern what he was on about. “Call… who?”
“Donovan,” Sherlock snapped, as if it were the most obvious answer ever - and after a moment’s consideration, Lestrade decided that it probably was.
“Okay,” he said, fighting for patience. “What’s she done?” By the time he’d uttered the words he’d figured it out, but it was too late to take the question back or fend off Sherlock’s anger.
“You know very well what she’s done, and I won’t have it. Her, upsetting John. Did you know that he’s a war veteran?” He didn’t pause long enough for Lestrade to answer. “Invalided out. He’s recovering, and I won’t have her setting him back!”
Lestrade nodded, very slowly and agreeably. “I understand,” he said, pitching his voice low, much as he would if addressing a rampaging beast with sights on his throat. “I didn’t know she’d planned to say anything to your… to John, but I suppose I could have guessed.” Yawning, he pushed aside a pile of paperwork and reached for his briefcase.
Unfortunately, Sherlock misinterpreted. “Oh, I’m sorry,” he said, his voice brimming with sarcasm. “Am I boring you? Are John’s combat-related stress disorder and panic attacks not important enough to--”
“Sherlock,” Lestrade interrupted, holding up a hand. “Calm down, I’m just tired is all, and I promise I’ll talk to her. Whatever happened, it won’t happen again.”
That seemed to mollify him, at least enough to halt further accusations or potential damage to his desk. “Not if you ever expect my help again,” Sherlock repeated, and this time the threat fully registered.
“Do you mean that?” Lestrade cocked his head to one side, curious. “You’d stop assisting with our most challenging cases, the ones that no one else has a clue what to do with if one of my staff…” He paused to find the right word, but really, he wanted to know: “…if one of my subordinates teases your boyfriend?”
Sherlock glared, but Lestrade knew him well enough to detect a trace of embarrassment beneath his anger.
He crossed his arms over his chest and smiled while leaning back in his chair. “So I was right about the two of you,” he said, allowing himself a bit of smug satisfaction.
Sherlock turned and swept out without asking for clarification.
Lestrade didn’t bother hiding his smile.
--
Lestrade had a few words with Donovan, but there was no danger that she’d take up tormenting John Watson as a hobby. She’s already said her piece and as she pointed out, it was nothing that Sherlock hadn’t declared for himself.
“Seems only fair,” she said. “If I was dating a man who called himself a sociopath, I’d want someone to tell me. In fact, I’d be irked if no one did. ‘Specially if I wound up dead in a ditch.”
He couldn’t argue with that. Well, he could, but Lestrade figured he’d had enough pointless discussions recently.
--
He called John a few days later to apologise, but John wouldn’t hear it.
“It’s not a problem,” he said. “You know how he gets.”
“True.” Lestrade thought for a moment. “Actually, no. I don’t. I mean, I know how he gets with boring cases and average people, but I don’t know how he is with a… with a partner.”
“Ah.” There was a slight pause before John continued. “I figured that with you having known him five years, well…” He cleared his throat a little. “But I suppose I’m the first war veteran he’s been involved with, and that makes it different. Remind him I was in Afghanistan next time you talk, eh? If I can survive that, I can handle random people reminding me that he’s… different.”
He laughed and after a slight pause, Lestrade joined him.
“I might not be Sherlock when it comes to deduction,” John finished, “but even I couldn’t have missed that.”
--
He never joined in on the betting for how long Sherlock’s relationship would last, but if he had, his estimate wouldn’t have been far off from Donovan’s - and they both would have been wrong. Months passed, and the happy couple remained both coupled and apparently quite happy.
He spotted them at a pub one evening, sitting close, their fingers woven together. Sherlock was talking non-stop - no surprise there - but he was also smiling, his eyes warm as he regarded his companion.
Another time, Lestrade nearly collided with them as they walked down the street outside the Yard. Sherlock had his arm around John’s shoulders and swiftly pulled him out of Lestrade’s path before impact. As Lestrade apologised, Sherlock glared.
“Quite all right,” John told them both before settling his eyes on Lestrade’s face. “In a hurry? Anything interesting?”
As it turned out, the case was interesting enough, and John’s medical expertise helped fit the final pieces together.
--
Lestrade had almost come around to Donovan’s assessment of Sherlock’s relationship - that John was somehow damaged and stuck with Sherlock because he had few other options - when he encountered the two of them at Bart’s, bickering with each other, a corpse sprawled on a table between them while Molly looked on with a helpless air.
“Absolutely not,” John told Sherlock, his gaze steely as he crossed his arms over his chest. “You have more than enough body parts at home. Whatever you’re going to do with these, you can do it here.”
Sherlock huffed out an exasperated sound. Lestrade couldn’t see his face from where he lingered in the hallway, but he had no doubt he was wearing one of his most vexed expressions. “You haven’t even asked what I need them for!”
John’s eyes narrowed into slits. “That’s because I don’t care what you need them for. They stay here. Whatever you need to do with them, you’ll do it here.”
“But this will take days! I need to write up my observations every twenty minutes for the next sixty-three hours or the whole thing is pointless.”
John gave a little shrug. “You’ll be staying for the next sixty-three hours, then,” he said, zipping up his jacket with a single decisive stroke. “Molly, if he tries to sneak anything out of here under his coat, you have my permission to shoot him.”
Lestrade jolted at that, but then Molly and John were laughing together while Molly fired a syringe filled with water near Sherlock’s feet. “Doctor’s orders,” she said, sounding far more relaxed than usual. Perhaps she should have been armed all along.
Sherlock grumbled, but much to Lestrade’s amazement, didn’t launch into a low estimation of their probable combined IQs or bemoan his lot in life, having to share breath with such inferior beings. “Fine,” he snapped instead, returning to the table and reaching inside the corpse’s chest. “But don’t bother sending any of those suggestive text messages this time. I won’t be responding. In fact, I’m going to turn off my mobile entirely.”
“Mmm,” John said, smiling a bit as he leaned in to brush his lips across Sherlock’s, and Lestrade decided to hurry down the hallway before he was caught spying. Besides, he’d already seen enough to set his mind at ease. Whatever John Watson was, he certainly wasn’t Sherlock’s hapless thrall.
He waited until John had been gone for at least ten minutes before returning to the room and giving Sherlock the good news: another gruesome murder, another puzzle that could likely only be solved by him.
--
The next time he saw them, they’d been called to the site of a kidnapping. The target was young and wealthy, which made a speedy resolution imperative, which in turn made calling Sherlock Holmes a necessity.
After Sherlock deduced that the teenage girl hadn’t been kidnapped after all and had, in fact, run off with her foreign-born lover, he tugged John against a car (okay, Lestrade’s car) and began kissing him with a sort of languid pleasure that suggested he’d forgotten the existence of the rest of the world. Lestrade watched for a moment before looking away, unable to shake the feeling that the street now somehow belonged to the two of them and he was intruding.
When he looked in the opposite direction, he found himself making eye contact with Mycroft Holmes, of all people.
“Turns out, she wasn’t kidnapped,” he began after taking just a beat to compose himself, but Mycroft didn’t appear to be listening. Instead, his eyes were on Sherlock and John.
“This,” he said with a sigh, addressing no one in particular, “will end in tears.”
But Lestrade was no longer so sure of that.