Lestrade read the text from Sherlock a second time.

Mycroft planning on becoming scandalous unwed father. Looking for input on maternal units as egg donors and surrogates. Free meal at Beloden. Interested? SH

The hell?

Unwed father?

Mycroft? Mycroft?!

The hell….

You're having me on, yeah? Taking the piss?

Not at all. Mycroft's planning on getting in the family way, more or less. SH

Right.

Yeah. I know. Surprised me, too. So—interested in dinner at the Beloden and a chance to tell Mycroft about mitochondrial DNA?

No.

?

Just…no. All right? No. Tell your brother to count me out.

Lestrade? Are you all right?

Just sod off, Sherlock. All right? Sod off.

He turned the mobile all the way off and rammed it into his coat pocket.

The hell. Mycroft bloody Holmes was going to have a kid. The British Government, gay as a May Day dance complete with ribbons and May Pole, so busy he might as well list his residence as a reserved jet plane, was going to invest a fraction of his filthy lucre, buy an egg, hire a womb, no doubt employ a few nannies and governesses, and waltz away with the prize.

Life, Lestrade thought with unexpected resentment, just was not fair. For years he'd hung on to an uneasy marriage with an unhappy wife, both of them holding out for the brass-ring win of a baby. He'd been down the entire road. It wasn't just the months he and she had spent before even marrying, trying to work out the pros and cons marriage offered each of them: a wife who'd given up on her One True Love, a husband who was decidedly bi, to her dismay.

The one thing on the very top of the plus ledger for both of them had been kids. They both wanted lots of kids. Five. Six, even. Lots of kids…

Not that they'd gotten any. Not the first year. Not the second. Then they got serious about it. There'd been the months "trying." And then the tests establishing they'd both managed to bring a few serious negatives to the fertility sweepstakes. Then the treatments, and the massive efforts. The temperature taking, the period-diary, the scheduled fornication. Then, when that failed, the IVF attempts. And the two miscarriages that followed. Then the beginning of the discussion of adoption. He'd been ready for it.

She hadn't. She told him it was different for him: that he didn't have to feel his body had failed their children, rejected them in the womb. He wasn't so sure. Sometimes he wondered what toxin was in his very sperm that his children died stillborn and unbreathing. She told him it was different for him: that men didn't want children in the same way women did. It didn't define them. But he'd wanted from his teens on to fill the role of father, seeing the worth in the eyes of good men, the reward in the tenderness of loving sons and daughters. For Greg Lestrade it would always be a question: what was a man if he was never a father? (And he dared never ask himself why he so valued his relationship with Sherlock Holmes, for fear the answer come back too clearly…)

He'd told himself that what he and his wife had lost with the chance of offspring they'd made up for in closeness built over shared loss. And then he'd slowly been educated in how little was shared when one spouse's loss turned into despair.

Someday, he thought, he might stop blaming her for looking elsewhere. It might be some time, though.

And now Mycroft bloody Holmes, Mycroft the spymaster, Mycroft who too often treated Lestrade as his proxy and errand boy, Mycroft who couldn't maintain a decent relationship with his own brother….

Mycroft was buying a baby. No doubt he didn't have to even look at his bank balance to work out the costs. Nor worry about adapting his work schedule: he could hire all the help he needed and no doubt tote the child from one continent to another with him without concern for loss of focus on his career: some things are just easier when money pays for support services.

Lestrade didn't want to know. He really didn't. Knowing was too likely to lead him down a path of bitter resentment, and Lestrade was not a man who favored that kind of surly bitterness. Better to just avoid the entire thing until he got past it one way or another. If he just kept his distance and refused to play a part, it would all pass in time.

Or, he thought, listening to Molly Hooper chatter on a week later, maybe not?

"I think he should pick another red-head," Molly said, cheerfully. "Reinforce the recessive gene, yeah? With just one parent the kids are going to want to look like their dad, aren't they?"

"Kids?"

"Yeah—he's planning on more than one," she chirped, obviously delighted. "Mary and John and I have suggested he pick one egg donor for all of them, so they all look related. Easier for them to feel like family that way, right? Pick the right woman, and stick with it. But we're also hoping he'll pick a different nucleus mom and a different mitochondrial mom. Best of both worlds that way."

"Isn't that illegal? Human genetic manipulation?"

She snorted. "Only if you're a wussy. It's easy-peasy, and nothing at all like recombinant stuff. And he's Mycroft. No reason he can't have it all, after all."

"I guess not, if you're the British Government," Greg said, then went silent hearing the anger in his voice. Life was different if you were the BG, not a DI with the Met whose wife was an administrative assistant.

"Here are some mock-ups," Molly said, leaning over her office desk top and pulling up images. "Mary and John put them together working from what we know about Mycroft and Sherlock's genetic workups, and about some of the possible mothers. This is the one I like." She flicked to a page showing three young women of ages ranging from late childhood to early teens. They were tall, slim, freckled, with bright ginger hair in soft curls that reminded Greg of Sherlock at his most Byronic.

"No sons?" he found himself asking, against his will. He'd have chosen some of both, he thought: the picture needed a couple gawky proto-Weasley boys to go with the girls. Long and graceful as Mycroft and Sherlock, with legs that would go on for miles.

"Mycroft says he's done better mentoring women," Molly said, then added in hushed, confidential tones, "but I think he's really just afraid that he and a son would have as many problems as he and Sherlock have."

Lestrade thought about his sometime-boss. The man was driven, in so many ways, for so many reasons. He could see the potential there for Mycroft to over-invest in a son's successes and failures. Even if he'd had a spouse it might not have been enough to stem that hunger for a boy to fulfill every dream Mycroft had ever had, both those he'd succeeded at, and those he thought he'd failed.

It was hard to admit that the man was making a good choice…not when Lestrade wanted to reject his choice out of hand. But…

"He may have a point," he said. "How do you think he'll do with girls?"

Molly giggled. "He's a sweetie. I think it's all easier for him with us, at least so long as we're not stalkers crushing on him. I've talked with his PA, and she thinks he's the bee's knees."

"Bee's knees?" Lestrade snorted.

Molly twinkled at him. "Yeah, ok. Doofy vocabulary. Sue me. She still thinks he's super."

Greg nodded. "Yeah. And…hell. It probably won't matter much anyway. It's going to be nannies and governesses from birth to boarding school in any case."

"I don't think so," Molly said, firmly. "If Sherlock's right, his brother's planning on real family. I mean, yeah, they're toff-ish. I guess there will be some 'help.' But I get the feeling Sherlock's freaked because Big Brother's really hungry for kids and family and the whole thing. You know Sherlock. 'Sentiment.' He's trying to cover it up with snotty comments, but he's a bit wired."

The idea that Mycroft Holmes might hunger for children with the same deep longing Greg felt was…unsettling. He wasn't sure if it made him feel better or worse. More accepting? Maybe. More jealous? Yeah.

Oh, yeah…

He looked at the little fantasy family peering out of Molly's screen, every freckle picked out in cinnamon pixels. Blue eyes… blue-eyed red-heads.

If he'd been having that family they'd have hair ranging between his cousin's ginger-chestnut and the dark taffy-brown of his youth, and their eyes would be brown and glossy-bright as fresh conkers. They'd only freckle in summer, the speckles dusting across the tops of wide, solid cheekbones and over the bridge of short, neat noses like a powdering of gold. Otherwise they'd go nut-brown at the first kiss of the sun. Their hair would go all sun-bleached and streaky. Their hands would be neat and square and clever, quick on guitar strings or keyboards.

And, dammit, thinking of it made his throat hurt and his eyes burn. He turned away.

"Greg?"

"Got to go," he said, and was out of the lab before she could say more.

On the drive to the Met he wondered, not for the first time, if it was anything to do with being bi. He didn't think so. He'd known too many men straight as a plumb-line who'd loved their fatherhood. It wasn't something men talked about much, but surrounded by the rafts of testosterone in the Met he'd had a good chance to see what a massive body of men's men cared about, and a lot of them cared about their kids—cared to have kids, cared to be involved with their kids, wanted to be fathers. It wasn't a matter of not being "man enough," not that he'd ever wasted too much worry over that. It was, if anything, a matter of being too much man, in his own estimation. Or being an old fashioned man—the kind of man who thought he'd only reached the apex if he had offspring, preferably scads of offspring. Kids to hold, to tickle, to walk back and forth on colicky nights, to teach to tie shoes, to take for walks, to show the knack of moving a ball down a footie field, to do homework with, to see married. Kids to read to at night. Kids to give "the talk," and embarrass with demonstrations of condom technique using bananas, complete with final gifts of boxes of condoms for both the girls and the boys, because damned if he wanted any daughter of his growing up ignorant or getting knocked up at sixteen. He wanted kids to give him grandkids, though, eventually, in their own time. Kids to pack around the table at Christmas time. Kids to introduce to Doctor Who. Kids…

He shoved it all aside. He was fifty. He was single. Divorced. Far from wealthy. His window of opportunity had passed, even if Mycroft Holmes' had not. It was time to be a big-hearted man and wish his sometime-boss the best, assuming he really did want this kid—these kids—as much as Molly Hooper thought.

The next time he saw Mycroft Holmes, he had to accept that the man almost certainly did want a child with a hunger he could only recognize. There was a…what? Not a softness, exactly. Mycroft Holmes was not a soft man. But something was thawing in those eyes, and for some reason he seemed to have more color, more life. More happiness, like Lestrade's wife had during those few short weeks of pregnancy, before the miscarriages.

They were reviewing Lestrade's notes on Sherlock's most recent work with the Met, and the implications for long-term involvement.

"He's doing better since he came back," Lestrade said. "I'll be honest: he can still be a little prick. But he's learned at least a few social skills over the years, and I think he's too grateful to be back to risk it as much as he would have four or five years ago."

Mycroft nodded. "A genius who can't learn at least some social skills is no genius," he said. "Even the parts one learns by rote are still learnable, after all."

Lestrade glanced at him. "How much of your social skills are rote, Mr.'Smarter than Sherlock'?"

Mycroft shrugged. "More than I like to admit; fewer than Sherlock needs to develop. Enough that…" He cut himself short, then risked a look at Lestrade. He didn't speak further.

"What?"

Mycroft shrugged. "Just a matter I'm taking into consideration."

"For the kid you're planning?"

"For my… family." There was something in his voice that turned "family" into pure love-talk.

Yeah. The sonofabitch really did want kids. Lestrade fought back a sigh. "Trying to find a potential mother with good social instincts, just in case it's a genetic factor?"

Holmes nodded, refusing to look up from the report Lestrade had handed in.

Lestrade found himself shifting to the voice he used with Sherlock, sometimes. His father-voice, dammit. "I'm sure it's going to be all right, Holmes. You're really working on it, and that's usually more important than having the best genes. They'll learn from you."

Mycroft shrugged, for all the world like a little boy afraid to admit some inner pain. "So much can go wrong."

"Look," Lestrade said. "You're going to do all you can. Pick the best mom. Find a good surrogate. Make sure the kid has the best care before its even born and after. Even kick out any sperm that are sub-par, if I know you. And in the end you're still going to get a little pink lump that's wet at one end and loud at the other and messy no matter which way you turn it. And it's going to get some things right, and some things wrong, and the same goes for you, and you're just going to have to get past that, or risk screwing yourself and the kid up seven ways to Sunday. Get ready to give up perfect and settle for real…because that's what you're getting, no matter what. Eh?"

Mycroft looked at him, eyes wide and jaw dropping open, and Lestrade blushed. "Not like I know anything," he added. "No kids of my own. But it stands to reason, you know? If you could get it all right, it would be a different world, wouldn't it? To begin with, we'd both be out of work, you know?" He flushed, and started gathering his papers together, determined to get out before he embarrassed himself further. "Got to get back to the Met," he said. "Got a week's worth of paperwork backed up." Which was a lie, but he was willing to lie for a good cause.

He rose, and made himself meet Mycroft's eyes. "Look, I haven't said so, but I want you to know, I wish you the best on this. I know it matters to you. So—just, good luck, mate, eh? Hope it all goes well." He was relieved to find that even envy and jealousy weren't enough to make those wishes false. He did want this to go well for Holmes. The man was too obviously invested in it for him to wish him the sort of discouragement and despair Lestrade and his wife had experienced. Misery might love company, but Lestrade couldn't find it in himself to wish Mycroft to be among the miserable. He gave a nod, then, and eased out of the office, relieved to escape before he'd given away more than he had.

What he failed to take into account was that Mycroft was a Holmes, and what Lestrade had revealed was far more than he'd ever dreamed.