"D'you think that poor daft bugger will be all right, John?"

"Henry Knight?"

Lestrade nodded. Sometimes he met John Watson for a pint after a case. Sometimes it was more necessary than others. In a different world… no. There was surely no world in all the multiverse where Sherlock Holmes met anyone for a pint. Not even someone _named_ Sherlock Holmes.

If you followed this to its conclusion, Lestrade thought (not often, but he did think it), there always had to be a Watson for a Sherlock to flourish. Someone to interface with the humans, go for pints, interpret for both sides. He'd tried, God knew, his ex knew, Mycroft knew—even Sherlock knew—that Lestrade had tried: tried to be whatever Sherlock needed for his brilliance to coalesce into something safe and focussed. But he wasn't enough. And Lestrade had (to some extent, at times) a life of his own; he didn't want whatever time he had outside of work to belong to Sherlock.

But it seemed, in this instance of the infinite possibility—(in which, by the way, Lestrade did not believe. Infinite to the point that there were a lot, perhaps, but not infinite infinite)—

That this John Watson wanted this Sherlock Holmes to flourish, and he might be enough. Which was why Lestrade had found himself with something he needed to say, and he was avoiding it with most of his not inconsiderable facility.

The case they had just finished had enough craggy bits to talk over that Lestrade knew he could put off the thing on his mind indefinitely. Perhaps having inhaled a hallucinogen together would allow it to pass without comment, and Lestrade could just act like a fifteen-year-old girl for a moment and not have it change the nature of the friendship he had with John.

John was eating crab salad and thinking about Henry Knight. "He didn't seem to have much in the way of a support system in the first place, not anyone we met. I could ask Sherlock if he noticed traces of a, a girlfriend or anyone; but Henry called Dr. Mortimer when the shit was coming down, not anyone else. And she may want to get the hell out of it all."

Lestrade recalled meeting her in the melée of police and military and outraged locals after Frankland had blown himself up and helicopters had descended on them. "Maybe I can ask the Devon cops to sic a social worker on him."

"There can't be many support groups for people traumatised by mad scientists."

"He could go in with the people who survived being wrapped in bombs by Moriarty." Something flickered across John's face and settled into wilful calm. "Oh, God, sorry, John. I forgot that included you."

John shrugged. "Just don't assume I want any part of it. So. Henry. Not a great chance of being all right. You and I should write him a reference: 'If Mr. Knight tells you he was played for years by the man who murdered his father and dosed him repeatedly with weapons-grade hallucinogenic gas, please be assured he is telling the unvarnished truth and his paranoia is not by any means unfounded. John Watson, MD. Gregory Lestrade, DI.' "

" 'Sherlock Holmes, ID.' "

John raised his eyebrows. "'Insulting Dick'?"

"I had in mind 'Insufferable Detective'."

" 'Insufferable Consulting Dick.' "

"Nice," agreed Lestrade.

"But Henry," John continued. "He's rich, which is a help, but he needs something to do—something he _has_ to do— or his mind may just eat itself up. That was what was happening before he came to us, after all."

"Along with someone actively trying to drive him insane."

"Regardless." John waved off the part about Henry's being the focus of an murderous chemist as though it were an everyday inconvenience and went on. "I think it's harder to be healthy, whatever you want to call healthy, when you've been running in an unhealthy groove most of your life, you know?"

Lestrade nodded.

"And I mean—giant dogs and suicidal ideation and flashbacks—I don't think Henry's been _right_, so-called, since his dad died. Was killed. He hasn't got much to go back and build on. Like I was, but worse." John saw Lestrade staring at him. "I know a bit about suicidal ideation, didn't think that was a secret."

"You may have been wrong, John. Jesus. When you came back from the war?" Lestrade was used to more euphemism from civilians; he still forgot, sometimes, that there were other people besides coppers who couldn't be called that.

Assuming anyone who ran with Sherlock Holmes could be called 'a civilian' anyway.

John nodded. "Yeah. Sherlock saved my life, I think. You know what the statistics are like for returning soldiers. I wasn't good. My sister Harry isn't much of a support system at best and she was getting ready to divorce when I came home; she was a mess. Sherlock, believe it or not, was very…grounding."

Lestrade tried to comprehend how bad off you'd have to be to find Sherlock Holmes a calming influence. Particularly the way Sherlock had been eighteen months earlier, when he'd met John. Then again:

"I knew a pair of blokes, bit like you and him. One of them shot someone to protect the other practically the first day they met. Would you have called that …grounding?" He was very careful not to meet John's eyes; it was a touchy subject, killing, particularly if you were talking with a police officer. But that kind of difficult topic wasn't what Lestrade wanted to discuss.

John looked guileless, in a completely unconvincing way. "Well. Killing someone is a bad thing, hardly a good way to fit back into normal society."

"But I imagine it would either make or break a friendship. Cards on the table as to where you you stand, how you feel?"

"In a kind of schematic way, maybe," John said. He took another mouthful of crab salad, chewed and thought for a moment. "I mean, not wanting a bad guy—I'm assuming it was a bad guy?—hurting someone, that isn't out of the ordinary."

"No," agreed Lestrade. "But suppose something like that had happened with you and Sherlock—"

"Hot blood: split-second chance; either do it or not? If your shooter saw it was a choice between a bad guy or a good guy's life, he might have just made the call, not much to do with friendship."

"I think I felt more comfortable thinking it was friendship, affection."

"Mad crush?" asked John, compiling the last of his salad.

"You keep saying you're not gay."

"It doesn't have to be erotic every time a weedy fourth-year looks at a first-eleven sixth-former who lets him eat at the same table. Just wonderful to be noticed. You know."

"Yeah, I do. Is that what it was like, then?"

"For about two days. Then the scales fell from my eyes and I noticed I was the adult in the room. After that we could begin to be friends. To the extent that…" John's mouth made a flat bleak line, and he fell silent.

Lestrade went and fetched two more pints. "Here," he said, giving one to John.

John raised his glass almost infinitesimally to Lestrade and took a swallow. "Thanks. It's been a shitty, lousy, terrible spring so far. And I'm not about to move out or anything, but Christ, he's a lot of work sometimes."

"Well, I know this last case was a bugger."

"He deliberately exposed me to a drug designed to produce more or less straight-up PTSD, as if I needed that, because he needed a control."

Lestrade wondered what John would like him to say. "He thought you could take it? He forgets people have flaws, histories? He thought you were steady enough to BE a control?"

John smiled grimly. "You're right. I should probably be flattered. You know another thing that drives me insane, besides weaponised aerosols? Half the time he thinks I am a sentimental fool and the other half he treats me like the same kind of scientist he is."

"Mad?"

"No, cool, abstracted. Out there. He experiments on himself when I can't stop him, so why wouldn't he use me the same way?"

"That's a hell of a compliment, really."

"I suppose."

"No, really."

"I'm not scraping for them," John said. "I'd just be satisfied with him being as rational as he wants to believe he is."

"Isn't he?"

"Apart from experimenting on himself? Apart from the panic attack when he realised he couldn't actually rely on his brilliant mind not to hallucinate?" John sniffed. "And you weren't around for much of the Irene Adler drama. I don't really know but he went from composing pavanes for a dead dominatrix to…I have no real idea,"

"I remember her drugging him. She was the body he went to see after the Christmas party, right? And she wasn't dead?"

"I don't really believe she's dead now. You didn't meet her, did you?"

"No, but…I did look at her website, before it was taken down," Lestrade admitted. He could feel the blood coming into his face. "She'd melt a marble saint."

John snorted. "She did. Sort of."

"Sherlock? A woman?"

"Well, she was stunning—yeah, in many ways—and very clever. The way into Sherlock's heart isn't below his neck like most of us, but she got there. I think."

"I wish I'd met her."

"No, you don't. Not as batshit crazy as Moriarty, but as manipulative as Sherlock and Mycroft put together. In better packaging and she played it for all she could, believe me. Sherlock was more interested in her mind; but he was really, really interested. And she was just as interested back, except he wanted to study her brain-I'm pretty sure—and she wanted to use him."

Lestrade wondered if John had any idea how much he showed his own feelings about The Woman. How strong the feelings were that he had. "Did she get what she wanted?"

"I doubt very much she got another notch on her bedpost. Sherlock won the last hand, he did get into her phone in the end, but…I don't even know any details, so it's not that I'm not telling you; but I think it was a near thing."

"And she's out of the picture."

"So I am led to believe. I don't. If his little trip to Karachi last month didn't have something to do with her…despite his brother trying to snow one or both of us, probably just me. I have no idea why they needed a pawn. Also, while I'm venting, I hate Mycroft. At least sometimes Sherlock is, for lack of a better word—" John paused, trying to find any kind of word. "Nice? Pleasant? No. Charming? Amusing?"

"Everyone hates Mycroft. He's a user and a schemer because he wants to be, because it's useful to him. It's a way of life for Mycroft. Sherlock doesn't…he isn't the same way, at least not so consistently."

"Innocent, almost," mused John.

"That's it. At least some of the time," said Lestrade. "You realise we are possibly the only two people in England who would call Sherlock Holmes innocent?"

"Besides his brother, who thinks Sherlock's an idiot because he's only a manipulative bastard half the time. What a family."

"You said Asperger's, the other day," Lestrade reminded him.

"I spoke in haste. I don't think he's that, and I don't have the specialisation to say so either way in any case. Just sometimes it would be restful to push all that 'Insufferable Consulting Detective' we were talking about into a neat neurological label. Which wouldn't really help when I want to pummel him, any more than it does with people who do have all the clinical signs. Of anything. No, I'm going to blame nurture—or lack of it-over nature this time; I think it takes experience to become as suspicious and hostile and defensive as those two are."

"Blaming the parents?"

"God, yes," John said. "Sins of omission, if nothing else, and it wasn't 'nothing else'. His father took off at some point, early, and his mother wasn't much help. I have no idea who raised him; Mycroft must have left home when Sherlock was about six or seven. And Sherlock in school—" John shook his head. "Can you imagine? I know some kids find a coterie of brothers in boarding school but—"

"Posh, yes; fitting in, no," agreed Lestrade. "I met him after he left Cambridge and he hadn't been happy there, either."

"I met one of his…contemporaries from Cambridge last year. I'd have taken to drugs myself."

"Privileged scum?"

"Investment banker."

"There you are, then." They drank for a moment in silence. "And yet Sherlock trusts you," Lestrade said. "He's not quite too damaged. And you must be special. I thought it was, ah, the drama of the Study in Pink case."

John shook his head. "He was almost as pleased about my limp going away as I was, so he liked having that reminder of his cleverness—his goodness—around. And the drama, as you put it—he said something approving about my managing to get you lot to the college as soon as I did"—Lestrade admired the way John was almost managing his tells—"but I think he was more surprised someone stuck around as his flatmate than that someone would kill to protect him. Hypothetically. I mean, Sherlock is aware that as normal, everyday pains in the arse go, he's more annoying than a murderous cabbie. Over a longer term."

"Yet there you are."

"I like him," John said resentfully. Then he shrugged and smiled. "Enough of the time, I guess. So do you; you understand why I stay."

Lestrade contemplated the understatement, decided to meet it. "I do like him. I couldn't live with him myself, but I'm grateful you can." He paused, inhaled, plunged. "He likes you. He more than likes you."

John wasn't too bothered. "Christ, you as well? The innkeepers wanted to know our china pattern, and so does everyone else. I keep saying it isn't like that."

"John."

"What?"

"What if it were like that?"

"Are we really talking about this?" Initialise: bother. Execute.

"Just for a minute. Hypothetically."

"Why?" Whatever reprieve John had had from anxiety at that supper was over. Lestrade was astonished at the speed John clamped shutters over himself. Damn. It was not going to be welcome news, if John even stayed long enough for Lestrade to speak.

Lestrade thought about all the ways he didn't want to queer Sherlock's pitch, to alter what was a relatively healthy system. But it was only relatively healthy, and the certainty had grown on Lestrade over the past year that Sherlock was smitten far beyond his wretched—unpracticed?-emotional capabilities. He exhaled.

"Because I've never seen him look at anyone the way he looks at you. Because IF Sherlock ever fell in love, it would most likely upset his sense of the rightness of things, of himself, even more than seeing giant glowing dog-beasts from hell; and I would want someone he trusts as much as you to walk him through it. And I'm sorry to dump this on you, John. I know you don't welcome—but I know you're not a bigot. And you need to be aware."Because, come down to it, I care for him more than I do you, and I worry about him, and I don't give a damn if it makes you uncomfortable.

John had shoved his plate aside before Lestrade finished speaking, focussed somewhere far away. One of his hands clenched and unclenched, apparently without his volition. "I really don't. You have no idea what you're asking," he said at last.

"I'm sorry," Lestrade said again. "I didn't mean to ask you for anything." So untrue. Hey, John, if there's anything of your own that Sherlock hasn't employed, demanded, taken over; any pocket of yours he hasn't picked; any last places he's left untouched in your life or your mind [or your body]: could you just map them out for him and hand them over?

Lestrade knew he ought to say the usual things, about how possibly he was wrong, how of course John knew Sherlock better than he did, about how John's in situ instincts were probably more accurate than Lestrade's spot-checks; but Lestrade didn't believe any of that. He would never have risked this conversation if he had. "Is this really news to you?"

"Yes. Mostly. Christ Almighty. Yes. I don't know." John rubbed his face again. "Damn. If we were talking before Irene Adler, I'd have said—no, I have no idea what I'd've said, but…if anything, she'd have been—only, no. Jesus." It was interesting to watch the wheels spinning in a mind more like his own than Sherlock's was, Lestrade thought. John was no fool, no idiot of any kind. Not wheels, more like—meteorites of information raising dust, rattling data into new arrangements. Killing perfectly innocent dinosaurs just trying to get on with their lives in peace.

At last John looked back at Lestrade. "I am going to hope to God you're wrong."

Damn it. He'd never thought John Watson was a coward.

"You're going to think I'm a selfish clod, but every time someone says we're a couple I've only thought of myself," John said. "And believe me, that's been enough. I do not date men."

And now there were tells all over him. Sherlock could probably have read them. All Lestrade could see, from his years as a copper, was that there was something up this particular tree. Lestrade was not trying to make an arrest, an enemy out of a friend. He consciously dropped his shoulders, took his eyes from John's face. "Apart from liking women, which I know you do—" your heterosexual privilege will not be compromised by any statement you care to make— "any particular reason….?" Lestrade let his voice trail off. This is not an interrogation, this is an opportunity.

John didn't seem to be taking it. Lestrade let the silence sit, not as long as he would have professionally but longer than, say, his ex-wife (who had explained non-cop, civilian courtesy to him more often and with less patience than John ever would to Sherlock) would have deemed polite. "Anyway," Lestrade said, caving, "I was talking about Sherlock, not you. You seem to want to protect him. If I'm right you might want to keep an eye open."

"How would I begin to be careful of his feelings when he notices every move I make and why? He'll notice me watching, now. You don't imagine we're going to have a cozy chat about it, do you?"

"I imagined that you would do better with some warning that feelings might be involved. Come, on, John, are you as unobservant as he's always saying? How can you not have noticed? He makes certain you get food even though he won't eat during a case himself. He barely tries to impress me anymore; he waits for you to tell him his deductions are amazing—they are, and I don't blame him for liking to hear you say so—but his eyes follow you from fifty metres away. It makes talking to him even harder. And you're the only one he asks—ASKS, to—" Lestrade sorted hurriedly to find a word without sexual connotations "—impinge on his personal space. He's not keen on touching—"

"No, he isn't. If you want neurology I will bet all I have on sensory overload issues, why he notices everything the way he does—"

"That's all well and good but I just don't want you to break his heart by accident."

"Oh, Christ, Greg, now I'll be breaking it on purpose, thank you so much." John pushed his chair back and dropped ten quid on the table. "I need air, I'm sorry."

"John, I'm sorry, I didn't—didn't mean to drive you away, didn't want—but—" Shit.

"No, don't worry, Greg, it's not—look, he's…whatever—himself—and I'm damaged, and we do just fine this way and I know you care about both of us, well mostly him but that's all right, he's higher maintenance and worth more and any other sentient being would be delighted, except not me. Probably see you next week unless the criminals take a spring mini-break, don't worry, all right? Just. Really, fine. Bye."

Lestrade watched him go, wondering what he had seen and heard before John's departure-more likely what he had missed was more important. Wondering whether they'd ever have an unguarded conversation again. He hoped so. He drank his beer. After a while, he drank the last half of John's and went home.