"Greg, please."
"No."
"It's just for a few days."
"Mycroft, there is no way I'm going to this bloody… what is it called?"
"Grimpen. Grimpen Village."
"I'm not going! I just got back from holiday! I'm not following your brother to some bloody "rustic" village. I'm home. I want to kick back and relax. You know, keep calm, carry on, all that. What I don't want is to be stuck in some awful bit of country where the only thing for dinner is some variation of roast! Let's stay in. Get Chinese. I haven't had a good dumpling in weeks."
"I'm sorry, but you're going."
"Mycroft…"
"Please don't make me order you. And don't worry. They have a lovely vegetarian bed-and-breakfast. Not just roasts."
"That's even worse!"
"You'll survive."
"Will I? Stranded alone with Sherlock in a bed and breakfast?"
"You won't be alone. John will be there."
"Will he?"
"Yes."
"Well, that does make it a bit better."
"Doesn't it? He's ever so helpful."
"Yeah, he is. Makes your brother a bit more palatable."
"A bit. Did I ever tell you the story of how I met him?"
"As I heard it, you didn't meet him, you kidnapped him."
"Don't be crude. I acquired him."
"You can't acquire a person, Mycroft!"
"Do you want to hear the story or not?"
"Yeah, yeah, all right."
"He'd only met Sherlock the day before, so there wasn't much time to prepare, but you'd be surprised what you can find out about a man in a day."
"Not that surprised."
"How so?"
"Well, remember how you met me? You can't have known who I was for very long. I'd only gone to Sherlock a few hours before."
"You'd been on the blog for weeks. So had half your division. These things get noticed."
"Yeah, but, you can't have known the other stuff just from my checking a website."
"I couldn't have guessed that if you were on a strange man's website at times that varied from, oh, tea time to one in the morning, perhaps you and your wife weren't on best of terms?"
"Yeah, but you can't have known why."
"Well, sometimes I use my intuition."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"Nothing at all. Now, as I was saying, I'd learned everything I could about John beforehand, and when you called me to say he'd showed up with Sherlock, I had the most wonderful idea."
"You rang the phones, right?"
"Oh, do you want to tell the story?"
"What? No!"
"Then stop interrupting!"
"Okay, okay, Christ."
"Can I go on?"
"Yes!"
"I saw that there was a phone box right where they'd entered the scene, and I had already started to realize that John was a bit… predictable. So I had a theory that he might leave the same way he came in. Well, he did, and we rang the phone, but you know what John was like."
"Still didn't believe it could all be happening because of him?"
"Precisely. I ended up having to ring two more before he picked up."
"Oh, God, that's hilarious."
"It was. You should have seen him limping about from one CCTV feed to the next. It was like watching a lost child. I felt almost bad being so bloody ominous with him."
"Yeah, well, you should!"
"Oh, calm down. It was a rite of passage."
"A rite of passage?"
"Sometimes you have to put people in extreme circumstances to see how they'll react."
"Oh, and Jennifer Wilson wasn't extreme enough for you?"
"A dead body? That was fairly routine for John Watson even before he met my brother."
"So, basically by your logic, you're saying that meeting you is worse than murder?"
"Will you kindly shut up, Greg?"
"Yeah, sure, of course. Continue."
"Oh, beyond that it's not much of anything you haven't already heard, I'm sure. If you've heard the telephone bit I'm sure you've heard the rest… Actually, from whom did you hear it?"
"From you."
"What?"
"You should really learn to watch how you get, you know, after."
"You must be joking."
"No, no, you were going on and on about how you did it! It was pretty fantastic, actually. I think I fell for you just a bit more at that."
"What? Why?"
"Well, any man who thinks making fun of John Watson's height is appropriate pillow talk is my kind of man."
"I didn't…"
"You did. 'Greg, Greg, you wouldn't believe what it's like! I mean I'd seen him in pictures and I knew the numbers, but Greg, he's so tiny! He's like a bloody hobbit! I wanted to pick him up and put him my pocket!'"
"Oh, dear God."
"It was brilliant."
"You won't tell him, will you?"
"I won't, I won't. Oh, but it was so funny. You acted like I'd never met him."
"I was in a state of altered consciousness."
"Well, I knew I was good, but I didn't know I was that good."
"I didn't say you were."
"Yeah, you did."
"Oh, all right, I did. Why'd you ask me to tell it if you already knew?"
"It's one of my favorite stories."
"I'm glad I could be amusing. Will you go to Grimpen Village now?"
"No!"
"Greg, please!"
"Ugh, fine. Just a few days?"
"Just a few days."
"Don't do anything insane while I'm away."
"I can't promise that."
"Don't do anything too insane?"
"I'll see you in a few days."
"See you then, Mycroft."
"Goodbye, Greg."
"Goodbye. Hey, wait."
"What?"
"Remember to water the plant."
"Which one?"
"The one on the kitchen window sill, the others will be fine for a few days."
"All right. Now, goodbye."
"Bye!"