Disclaimer: I do not own Sherlock Holmes or characters thereof. I also do not own the BBC version of it.

There were days when Lestrade felt extremely lonely. He had a wife and they spent a decent amount of time together, what with the fact that he worked over forty hours a week. He always tried his best to make it home for dinner every night and give her the weekends but it didn't always work that way. He had lots of cases to sift through and the ones he was assigned normally had a deadline attached to it. Night after night, he worked on cases, trying to get them done as quickly as possible so he could catch the killer and get home to his wife.

But he knew better than to believe that his wife had the patience of a saint. She said when he had proposed that she was prepared for whatever trials their relationship would have to endure. However, he was watching her patience slowly thin. It was two years in and he was getting home later and later at night. He'd stopped expecting dinners, instead picking up food on his way home. There were no more cuddles at night; she had her side of the bed and he had his. His days off were filled with being dragged along for grocery shopping at the market and a chick-flick he couldn't care less about. He tried to endure it for her, to show that he cared about her still. But, most nights, his mind was still on his current case and it would weasel its way into conversations with his wife. He would fall asleep too early. She was pulling away. So was he. Even in her presence, he felt alone.

It all came to a head when he met Sherlock Holmes. The prat was still shooting up and enjoyed popping up at crime scenes to make Lestrade look like a bloody moron. He was getting increasingly frustrated with him. And, yet, he continued to put up with him because he was intrigued. No one else liked to have Sherlock around - hell, Lestrade hated to have him around - but 99.9% of the time, the druggie was right. He could see everything as clearly as if he was a witness of the whole crime and Greg couldn't see it. It drove him up the wall. He stood in the same spot as Sherlock, studied the same body, read the same files, saw the same blood-spatter. But he just didn't see what Sherlock did.

While dealing with Sherlock, one then had to put up with his pesky older brother. It was interesting to see. They seemed opposite at first but they were so alike. One flaunted his riches and the other wasted it away on things he believed would stimulate his intellect. One tended to use his intelligence only when extremely necessary and the other flaunted it consistently. But they were both brilliant and manipulative. Mycroft Holmes tended to be the most manipulative, using government threats to get what he wanted done.

It was irritating and stress-inducing when he had to put up with the Holmes brothers on an almost daily basis. He would have to stay late for either one on any occasion to finish whatever they wanted finished - whether it be a case or to make sure Sherlock was clean. He was feeling more and more isolated. He hardly ever got the chance to ask his wife how she was or how her week had been going.

One day, he finally had a break. He turned off his phone and left his office light off and locked the door. He picked up Chinese for dinner and set up a mock-romantic dinner for his wife (that was one of their first dates they'd ever had). After lighting the candles, he sat down and waited. On cue, about a half an hour later, his wife walked in and paused. And burst into tears. They weren't happy tears. Greg knew that their date was not going to be as wonderful as he'd planned. After a bit of convincing, she sat down and they ate a little bit in a tense silence. His stomach knotted and wouldn't allow much food to settle.

Finally, she set down her fork and softly said, "I can't keep doing this. I think it's best if you leave. Permanently." The divorce was implied.

Greg felt that he would never stop feeling lonely after that. He took his first sick day the following morning and packed his things. He stayed in a hotel for a few weeks until he could find a flat that he could afford. His second sick day was to move his things into his new flat. It was cold and unwelcoming and he had nothing to fill the walls with, nothing to make it look more personal. He slowly started buying furniture to fill his new home and even bought an odd piece of artwork to hang on his sitting room wall. The throb of lonely pain in his chest dulled hugely after that. He focused on his work to distract him from his lack of romantic partner. He focused on getting Sherlock clean so that he could ask him to help more often. He focused on pissing Mycroft off as frequently as he could in hopes of getting him to stop bothering him every day. He hardly spent any time at home.

And then, one day, Sherlock showed up at the Yard with a limping blonde fellow. The man had a stern but strangely soft face and eyes of liquid steel. It didn't take a Sherlock to know he was military. He eyed the new addition warily, wondering about a million things at once and only two seemed most important: did he do drugs; is he going to help or hinder? He asked neither. His first sight of John was in the living room of Sherlock's flat. The second was when he arrived at the scene of a fourth "connected suicide" and Sherlock vaguely introduced him as Doctor John Watson. He seemed both proud and weary of the title. Greg had never gone to war but he could imagine one would get sick of being reminded of it. He didn't ask about it.

It seemed that Sherlock had decided to have John as his new assistant because the blonde was almost always seen with him after that. And Greg slowly started to mind less and less. In fact, he was starting enjoy working with John. It made his days easier to cope with. He wasn't sure why and he wasn't positive when that had started happening. But he was perfectly fine with it.

Things between them shifted slowly. It wasn't just Sherlock and John and then Greg on the side. John seemed to want to put more effort into keeping Greg into the loop, wanting to go to the Yard even if it wasn't necessarily needed from him. They exchanged numbers at one point and would text constantly. One night, John woke from a nightmare and called Greg. After a bit of reassuring, they talked about absolutely nothing until they both fell asleep. It was small things. Things they stopped taking note of. Things that made Greg feel more alive than ever before but never had to say a word about. Things that got them both grinning like children on Christmas morning. And it didn't stop. They started going for lunch once in awhile, not calling it anything and not mentioning it by any sort of name. Things just were and things were good.

Then, one day, he woke up and found that his chest didn't hurt anymore. It wasn't even a dull throb. There simply was no pain. He was baffled. When he sifted through what could have possibly changed, he realized it was all a web that went into a pinpoint because of one person. John. He supposed that there was no understanding the whole ordeal. But he went to work practically whistling and Donovan choked on her coffee (he may have laughed at that). He sat in his office a moment and just grinned to himself.

Suddenly, Sherlock burst in with John trailing behind him. "I was summoned here?" He looked irritated. Greg glanced at his watch. It was half-past nine in the morning. He was puzzled as he turned back to the pair. "You didn't text me," he muttered, pulling his phone out again. He mumbled to himself as he walked back out the door. But John stayed, looking over at Greg.

After a full minute, John closed the door and walked over to the desk. "I'm not stupid. I have friends who teach me tricks." He had sent the text. He never explained how but Greg knew he had. "He was bored and needed something to do. Please tell me you have a case?"

They were both very aware that that was not the reason John had closed the door. "Take your pick," he said and gestured to the pile of case files he had to look through that day. "But you could have just called to ask for a decent case for him. Why are you here?"

For just a moment, John's face held nothing but uncertainty. It was if every second he'd spent whispering in front of the mirror to give himself resolve for this had melted away with one question. One unplanned question. Then he squared his shoulders and stated, "Take me to dinner. Pick me up at seven on Friday night." He plastered a nervous smile on his face that, frankly, Greg found adorable.

It took too long for Lestrade to gather his voice again. "I'm sorry but…" John's face started to fall. "I think eight might work better for me. My shifts tend to run a bit late." The grin that broke onto that face was the most amazing thing he had ever seen and it took everything he had to not jump him right then and there.

Fortunately (unfortunately?), Sherlock took that moment to burst back into the room, waving his phone. "John, explain this!" Greg just laughed and tossed a file at him.

A/N: This is a GregXJohn story for my itachan. It's her Christmas present. It's also my first attempt at a Sherlock fanfic. I could use a bit of critique?

The whole note on why I wrote this story specifically for her will be at the end of it.

Happy Holidays and I hope you enjoy! Please review!

~DMP