Why Lestrade really went to Baskerville.
Sherlock Holmes scratched the tip of his pen onto the small white page of his pocket note book.
He turned the book towards the still moderately peeved John Watson and waited as the ex-captain studied the changes to the word with his less-than-luminous eyes.
H.O.U.N.D
"You think it's an Acronym?" John asked questioningly, with a mild air of curiosity lingering in his voice.
Sherlock turned back to the entrance of The Cross Keys in a swish of black curls and cheekbones.
"Absolutely no idea." He responded, at ease at finally reconnecting with his recently more-than-hostile flatmate.
On looking through the front door of the restaurant into the small rustic reception area where John had first secured their reservations, Sherlock spotted a bright vision of linen and kaki hidden in the darkness of the restaurant reception area. The man smiled brightly and peered through his dark sun glasses towards the two men, his hands resting lazily in his trouser pockets.
"What they Hell are you doing here?" Sherlock exclaimed, stalking vigorously towards the tall, relaxed form of New Scotland Yard's Greg Lestrade.
"Nice to see you too. I'm on holiday, would you believe." Greg responded, the high twang of his voice breaking the monotone of Sherlock's deep baritone.
"No, I wouldn't" Sherlock shot back to the DI.
Greg watched intensely as John Watson's rigid form walked through the reception door, taking his sunglasses off in the process.
"Hello, John" he spoke, keeping his tone steady with all his musterable strength.
"Greg" John replied sprightly, walking right by the DI.
Sherlock stared at John as he passed, scrutinising the casual exchange of niceties between the two men.
"I heard you were in the area. What are you up to?-" Greg continued, trying to conceal the sourness building in his chest at the monosyllabic reply he received from John. "-You after this 'hound of hell', like on the telly?"
Sherlock stood looking at Greg, burrowing holes into various areas of his face.
"I'm waiting for an explanation, Inspector. Why are you hear?" Sherlock shoots down Greg's questions with his blatant childishness.
John sighed in the background at his flatmates behaviour and rolled his eyes out of view of the other two men.
"I told you, I'm on holiday." Greg replies.
"You're brown as a nut. You're clearly just back from your holidayS" Sherlock shouts back, clearly aggravated by the transparency of the DI's lies. John looks to the beautifully tanned skin of the DI in question and a pang of jealousy erupts through him. He looks to his own hands and curses his paleness. The sun of Afghanistan is long behind him.
"Well maybe I fancied another one." Greg answers weaker than before, trying to defend his lazy and casual excuses.
"Oh this is Mycroft, isn't it?" Sherlock sighs, clicking all the evidence together.
"Now wait-" Lestrade tries to interject but Sherlock continues regardless.
"Of course it is. One mention of Baskerville and he sends down my 'handler' to spy on me incognito. Is that why you're calling yourself 'Greg'!" Sherlock rolls off his deductions, his face visibly contorting to the idiocy of the DI's foolish 'disguise'.
The room is silent for a moment.
John turns and points towards the man in question. "That's his name". You idiot, John feels like finishing the sentence with, but he resist the temptation.
"Is it?" Sherlock shoots back to John, inquisitorial features on his face.
"Yes, if you ever bothered to find out-" Greg looks genuinely gutted and irate by the lack of respect the reckless sociopath projects to him, and John notices the dejection in Lestrade's tone.
"- look, I'm not your handler. I don't just do what your brother tells me." Lestrade turns from both men and stumbles over the words, feeling the stickiness of indisputable higher authoritative control compelling him to hold this conversation. After maintaining a position of power for so long, it is entirely humiliating for the secret ties of the British government to demand a Detective Inspector of New Scotland yard to follow a hooligan around the English countryside and hope he doesn't get up to mischief, or so John presumes besides.
"Wait. You could be just the main we want." John interjects, looking proudly at the obviously embarrassed DI.
"Why?" Sherlock chastises, clearly in denial of the genuine good fortune that Greg's appraisal may foresee.
"-I've not been idle, Sherlock. Here. I think I've found something. Didn't know if it was relevant-"
Greg Lestrade peers over the edge of the page from the other side of the hall, pint in hand, investigative intuition naturally kicking in.
"-It's starting to look like it might be. That's an awful lot of meat for a vegetarian restaurant." John concludes, showing Sherlock the receipt he pulled from the peg the previous day.
"Excellent." Sherlock's approval sends a wave of pride through John's chest, more than he is pleased to admit to himself.
"Nice scary inspector of Scotland Yard who could put in a few calls…might come in very handy." John stares directly at Greg Lestrade, trying to play out his plan in as few words as possible to the two supposedly intelligent men he hangs around with.
Lestrade's chest fills with a sense of wanted purpose and he smiles cunningly at the train of thought.
John slaps his hand against the bell on top of the desk in animated pride at his own deductive skills.
"Shop".
Having discovered the lame excuse behind the meat receipt from Billy and hearing Gary's confession, and being vaguely aware that Sherlock was trying to poison John's coffee with sugar, Greg Lestrade flicked through the two months' worth of documentation.
How could these men, neighbours of Henry Knight no less, sleep well at night knowing that they are profiting from the slow grips insanity is taking hold of the poor lost soul?
"It was just a joke, you know" Gary weakly tried to excuse their actions to the big scary Scotland Yard Detective Inspector.
At this Greg's face contorted into shadows of disbelief on hearing the concluding remark.
"Hilarious-" Greg snapped back, a defined snarl in his voice as he stood up to leave, "You've nearly driven a man out of his mind."
Greg stalked from the room, further emphasising the disgust of his last comment, leaving the two money-grabbing freeloaders to wallow in their own questionable morals.
On seeing the genuine distaste on Greg's face, John followed him out the door.
He caught the tail end of Greg's coat running around the corner and followed suite with a skip in his step. John had meandered his way through a network of small diverging corridors before a large tanned hand grasped the collar of John's green drawstring jacket and dragged the smaller man into a small nook hidden from view by a series of overlapping walls and a large framed window, out of sight from unobserved passers-by.
"Mycroft didn't send me" Greg whispered into John's ear.
"What?" John looked up to Greg, knitting his brows together.
"You know why I'm here; I just had to see you." Greg spoke softly, bringing his large hands up to John's face and gently caressing the smaller man's warm-with-embarrassment cheeks.
Greg leaned in closer into John's tensed 'military' form, which was being pinned between the two-foot hidden wall and the decorative Victorian style window frame.
"Greg, I told you I'm on a case. You know we can't get caught…"
"Shhhhhhh"
Both men stood in absolute silence as a tall dark shadow topped with a mess of curls loomed down the small passage they were seeking refuge in. Greg clamped his hand over his mouth to physically contain the noise of his breathing from the looming figure. John held an upright finger to his mouth in silence, his eyebrows arched and his lips pursed against the digit.
Both men could hear the sound of each other's heart's pound in their chests louder and louder with every second the shadow lingered.
After a few minutes of utter silence, the shadow moved on and disappeared down the network of small, claustrophobic corridors in the unlikely looking country cottage labyrinth.
Both men released the breaths that burned in their lungs in waiting.
"That was too close, love." John brought his hand up to his heart and held it there, trying to stop the hammering muscle from breaking through his chest cavity.
"But we're not in London anymore." Greg grinned continuing the previous conversation, showing a pearly white line of teeth. He returned his hands to John's face and reached in for the kiss he had been waiting so long to plant on his boyfriend in public.
"Yeah but the world's only consulting detective IS here and on his scent." John sighed, avoiding Greg's lips and looking down the corridor his friend passed through only moments before, tightening the deep stress marks of his forehead into touchable ridges and grooves.
"I know, I know. I just hate that we can't be seen together." Greg dropped his hands from John's cheeks and nuzzled his face into the side of John's neck, lowering himself and inhaling the natural scent of his lover deep into his chest. John made him feel so comfortable, so complete.
John smiled gently and cupped Greg's face in his hands, kissing his lovers lowered forehead with soft, warm lips and cooed, just above a whisper, "You know I would jump out right now and shout 'surprise motherfucker' to the great oaf and tell him all about it, had I the sense to, but you should know better than anyone what the repercussions of that would be."
Greg looked up and smiled, lines of guilt and secrets etched into the corners of his eyes.
"I know, love. I know what you would do for me. Urrgh. And it's all because of that great big twat, who doesn't even care that I made the bloody effort of hauling my ass down to this overpriced kip in the middle of nowhere. And he still doesn't even know my name. After all the times we've put up with him and his ridiculous ways." Greg signed and leaned his forehead against John's.
John pushed him back into the small nook he had previously occupied and crashed their mouths together in a tender yet fervent tangle of hot breaths, lips and tongues.
Greg smiled as they parted lips, "What was that for?" he asked a small giggle in his words.
"That's to keep you going until tonight. I haven't had a good snog in ages. Sherlock has me looking out for this Louise Mortimer girl. Thinks I've only got vaginas on the mind." John smirked and quickly pressed his lips to Greg's.
Greg held his head back and laughed quietly at the thoughts of his John pretending to be heterosexual. "You're not doing a very good job at pretending you're straight" he spoke through his smile.
"Oh gosh darn it." John jokingly replied.
"But at least no one suspects it is me and not that psycho- I mean- sociopath that you're giving it 'hell and leather' to at night"
John swatted Greg's arm silently, but couldn't contain the smirk.
"No 'hell or leather' for you tonight if you don't keep this quiet."
"Tonight?" Greg's face lit up and his mouth fell open in childlike glee.
"Only if you're good." John winked and began to straighten himself up before fixing Greg's hair and shirt buttons. The DI stood in awe and childishly clapped his hands together with joy.
"Come along, poppet. Can't have himself deducing anything more between us than is blatantly possible to see." John smirked and leaned up on his toes to place a gentle kiss to Greg's waiting lips.
"Aye, Aye, Captain." Greg smiled and gave Johns bum a cheeky squeeze before quietly hurrying back towards the front door.
The two men transformed in the space of time it took them to navigate toward the main door once more. For a small building it had an awful lot of corridors to get lost in.
After a long pause, John broke the silence with more platonic and generic words rather than romantic terms of endearment.
"You know, he's actually pleased you're here. Secretly pleased." He said, walking slightly behind his boyfriend as they emerged into the glaring light of day.
Greg looked back to John and responded, "Is he? That's nice. I suppose he likes having all the same faces back together to help his… his…" Greg left the statement open, unsure how to medically define their friendly sociopath.
"… Asperger's?" John questioning provides a possible solution to Greg's interpretative problem.
Following the newly emerged sound of familiar voices, Sherlock Holmes appear behind the two men, just beyond earshot of John and Greg's conversation.
Having sorted the finalities of the case and explained his plans to put to use his hard earned position of power to its full advantages, Greg nods his approval and begins to walk towards the main road.
"I'm enjoying this-" a genuine smile played across his face and his voice increased by a definitive octave.
"It's nice to get London out of your lungs" Greg smiles, walking back towards the road.
The look that passes in this instance between Greg and John might be seen, to an outsider at least, as platonic at most. Solid and assuring yet over in a fleeting instant.
But they both knew that the London Greg was referring to was not the build-up of city smog or carbon monoxide, but rather Greg longed to be released from the tight clutches of London and its dualistic cosmopolitan yet work-centric culture.
He couldn't let love interfere with his career and John wouldn't respect Greg if he gave it all up to settle down and start a family. It was too much for John to bear at this time in his life, with Greg already having a family of his own, he didn't want to further complicate an already messy divorce.
When the time came, when work became the bane of their existence, they would cut all ties and move to the south of France, away from the buildings and the people of their great capital.
John smiled gently to himself as the love of his life walked back towards the smog of London and whimsically counted the days until their escape from the big city. The great barrier. Their great barrier.
John shuck his visions out his head and turned back to Sherlock, least he should arouse any suspicions in his highly intuitive flatmate and continued to embark on his current enthralling adventure.