Author Notes:

TRIGGER AND SENSITIVITY WARNING: This chapter contains rather graphic descriptions of a crime scene involving burned corpses. If this makes you squeamish in any way, please exercise caution.

Also, this isn't Brit-picked, and though I've tried to do research there and in other aspects (like for the case), there's still a good chance I've messed something up. If so, I apologize.

Greg was only at the crime scene long enough to hear a rundown from the officers who were already present and slip into a set of anti-contamination scrubs to get a miserable look at the bodies before he planted himself at the crime scene entrance point to wait for Sherlock. He sighed heavily and winced when he felt a drop of rain hit the top of his head. Luckily, he didn't have to stand there alone in the rain long before a cab pulled up across the street. Greg's heart thudded with nervous energy as he watched Sherlock step out of the cab… alone.

"No John tonight?" Greg asked as Sherlock strode purposefully through the strengthening rain. He was keenly aware that the presence of Sherlock's mate tended to make the rather erratic detective more stable and agreeable, if only because John was never shy about stating his own opinion or forcibly yanking his Alpha back in line. Without John there to smooth over any potential bumps in the conversation, Greg nervously began to have second thoughts about his plan.

His palms tingled with an unpleasant clamminess; he attempted to wipe them against his thighs to get rid of the cold sweat, only to awkwardly realize it was no use with the crime scene gloves and scrubs he was wearing. Even worse, Sherlock noticed the odd movement and raised a disapproving, patronizing eyebrow at the display. Greg quickened his steps slightly; maybe if he stayed a step or two ahead of Sherlock literally, he could do the same metaphorically and also recover some dignity.

"No," Sherlock said, squinting at Greg's nervous mannerisms. He only broke the skeptical look when his eyes caught something on the ground a few paces away. He veered over to investigate, and Greg didn't notice until he turned to ask Sherlock his next question.

Thrown off, Greg cleared his throat and tried to settle into the kind of swagger someone with his level of authority really ought to have as he approached the eccentric detective. Again, the scrubs did not help. It made him look a bit like a powder blue, constipated penguin. "What's this, then?"

Sherlock stood from where he had been stooping, holding a slightly soggy business card. He frowned at the card for a moment before he showed it to Greg. "Are you familiar with this symbol?"

It resembled a four-pointed star with a sideways, angular, and incomplete hourglass at its center. Greg crossed his arms and tilted his head. He could have sworn he'd seen it somewhere, but he couldn't place it for the life of him.

"I think I've seen it before, but can't say I know where. Got an idea what it is?"

"No. I'll set the homeless network on it to see if it's a tag affiliated with any gangs, but I have my doubts." He slipped the card into his pocket. "If it were, why use a very small, well-produced business card when there's a perfectly dilapidated old building right here to cover in graffiti? No, it must be something else."

"D'you think it's related to this case?"

"No idea. Could be incredibly vital for this case, or it may merely be a clue for another time. In any case, what matters is that I've got it," Sherlock replied, moving once again toward the crime scene entrance. Once there, Greg lifted the yellow police tape, and they made their way inside.

Their steps echoed off the walls of the enormous room as they entered. The building was little more than one large storeroom, save for a small room near the entrance. Back when the building had been in use, the room might have seemed mysterious. What could have been hidden away behind its out-of-place steel door? Time had revealed the disappointingly trivial truth. The hinges at the door had rusted away, and the door had fallen to join the thick coat of dust on the ground. The secret room was little more than a toilet for whatever watchman had been on duty, though now it seemed a family of rats had made a cozy home for themselves there.

Being long abandoned, the building had been stripped of whatever it had formerly stored. Now it was empty and cavernous, with the exception of the bustling activities of Scotland Yard at the wall furthest away from Sherlock and Greg. With no electricity to speak of, they'd brought in several lamps to light up the crime scene area. There were occasional bursts of even brighter light as three detective constables photographed the bodies while, several paces away, another constable spoke with someone else. Sherlock couldn't quite see who it was, given the distance and the fact that the constable's body was obscuring the other from view.

Greg let them walk toward the crime scene for a few seconds in silence before he tried his plan out again. He needed to gauge Sherlock's mood. Time to test the waters some more and see if it would be all smooth sailing or if Sherlock would take a bite out of his leg like a great white shark. "So, uh, about John not being here. You two having a tiff?"

Sherlock gave a derisive snort. "Nothing of the sort. He has a persistent illness, and I managed to convince him to sit this one out. Mostly by being careful to not wake him up when I left."

Greg couldn't help but laugh at that, even as he shook his head. "Oh, he's not going to be happy about that."

"Not if I return before he wakes up," Sherlock said. "It's for the best that he isn't here right now."

"Really? You never struck me as the sort to buy into the whole 'protect the Omega's delicate sensibilities' business."

Sherlock gave Greg a glance that could wither fruit from the vine. "Lestrade, I realize it may be a challenge for you, but do try to refrain from being so dim. You've known me long enough to be keenly aware that I am not that sort," Sherlock said. "John may rejoin me in stooping over hideously disfigured and eviscerated corpses when he's less likely to vomit on them. It contaminates the crime scene."

"Well, is he alright?" Greg asked, now genuinely concerned.

"He's fine. Nothing more than an ailment which has plagued billions of humans throughout the entire course of our existence as a species," Sherlock replied, his tone clearly impatient. "It's a temporary condition."

"Ah, good to hear it's nothing serious. Sorry he's caught the flu that's been floating around."

"Your attempts at deductions are quaint, but it might be wise to leave them to the professionals." Before Greg could complain that technically speaking he was one of the professionals while Sherlock was more or less an extremely talented freelancer, Sherlock continued. "If all small-talk pleasantries are aside, I need to hear what you know about the incident which has us here tonight."

"Right," Greg said, nodding. The old idiom might be 'You draw more flies with honey than vinegar', but one of the best ways to win Sherlock over was to ply him with gruesome murder. "The bodies were found two hours ago by a night watchman on patrol at one of the neighboring buildings. He took a break for a cigarette and happened to see smoke coming from over there." He pointed to a large shattered window near the two bodies. "When he came to investigate, he found the bodies and called us."

Sherlock gave a thoughtful hum. Now much closer, he could easily make out the two figures who were talking away from the activity around the corpses. The constable, a young ginger-haired Beta lad who was still in an uphill battle against acne, was indeed talking to someone who was wearing the uniform of a night watchman. The young guard's skin had gone waxy and pale, and he was obviously very shaken by what he had discovered. "So he's the one having a chat with Constable Spotty."

"It's Spalding and he can't help his skin being the way it is," Greg chastised. "But yeah, that's him. We don't think he's anything more than the unlucky bloke who stumbled across this mess."

"Agreed. He hasn't got the posture of a murderer-arsonist. On the other hand, I imagine you'll find several counts of petty larceny on his record. Don't hold that against him, though, as he is obviously trying very hard to be a fine upstanding citizen now. No one his age would willingly guard a terracotta manufacturing warehouse, after all."

"Hold on, I never specified where he worked. How'd you know?"

Sherlock rolled his eyes. "The dust on his shoes. It's the tell-tale pale pink of terracotta produced from London clay." He scoffed. "What a dull thing to guard all night. The things people do for a relationship."

Greg squinted in confusion. "How do you figure?"

"The ring on his left hand. Isn't that what the Beta minority resorts to when they attempt to bond, as they're incapable of delivering or sustaining bondbites?"

Greg really couldn't believe Sherlock's senses sometimes, even though he knew beyond a doubt that the deductions would prove to be correct if they were checked out. To spot a bit of clay dust and the glint of a small gold band at their distance was stellar.

"Wow," he muttered.

"John is much better at delivering praise at crime scenes than you are," Sherlock said. "Now, the bodies."

They finally came close to the terrible scene. Sherlock waved off the forensic officers, who stepped aside and went about investigating the rest of the building once Greg nodded for them to get on with it. With a small sigh, the Detective Inspector thanked his lucky stars that Anderson wasn't there to raise a fuss.

Sherlock loomed over the corpses. Even from a good distance away, the smell was overpowering. Not the sweetly sickening smell of rot and decay, but the acrid bite of smoke and burned flesh, as if someone had left a cut of pork on a grill for far too long. Sherlock's nose stung as he took in a deep breath; his sense of smell was acute even for an Alpha, and his finely tuned scenting ability had helped in many a case. He scowled. The corpses were too long dead and too badly burned to determine by scent if the victims were Alphas, Omegas, or Betas. Even though the detective could smell the presence of some form of fire accelerant – kerosene, he believed with a 98% certainty – beneath the burn, that was staggeringly easy and certainly wouldn't help identify the bodies any quicker. The sooner a corpse had a name and face put to them, the sooner you had a list of likely perpetrators in the form of 'friends' and family.

And Sherlock could already tell it would be an arduous process getting these bodies identified. If the Yarders had found ID on or near the bodies, Lestrade would have mentioned it. Identifying the bodies by any distinctive clothing, such as uniforms with names or other highly specialized garments, was also out; if the bodies had been clothed before the fire was set, the fabrics had long burned away. To confound matters even more, the soft tissues and fattier parts of a body were always the first to burn away. Not only could Sherlock not tell by scent if the corpses were Alpha, Beta, or Omega, but the crotches and chests of the victims were a stomach-turning mess of burned flesh, making it impossible to determine if they were male or female. The groins were so extensively burned that either the fire had been started there or the lion's share of the accelerant had been put there.

Greg watched as Sherlock prowled around the bodies, his eyes darting wildly as he scoured them for information to file away mentally. Finally, the consulting detective spoke. "Prevailing theories?"

"Murder's most likely, but at this point, we can't really discount anything. The way the bodies are laid out – on their backs with their arms calmly at their sides – mean they probably weren't struggling or trying to stop the fires. So, probably already dead when they were dumped here and set on fire," Greg said. "No sign of any ID and they're too badly burned with sight alone. We'll probably have to go for dental records"

Sherlock, who had continued to pace around the bodies as Greg spoke, stopped abruptly. A little spark of something lit up behind his eyes. "Dental… bites. Bites! Of course!"

Greg was glad that the other members of the investigative team weren't close enough to see the manic grin that had appeared on Sherlock's face. The tall detective dropped to his knees by the slightly shorter corpse. "I need to touch the bodies," he said, not even bothering to look up from the body. He lifted his right hand and made an impatient grabbing motion. "Gloves, John."

Greg rolled his eyes. More and more often if Sherlock got caught up in the throes of investigation-related inspiration, everyone who stood by him and acted helpful tended to turn into John Watson in his head. Maybe it simplified things so he could focus more fully on the task at hand. Greg couldn't be bothered to care about the particulars of the quirk, as long as Sherlock didn't try snogging him like he occasionally did with John while caught up in the adrenaline rush of case inspiration.

He reached into the pocket of his forensic suit and handed Sherlock a spare pair of latex gloves.

"Thank you," Sherlock said. Greg raised an eyebrow. John must have really stepped up his game recently when it came to training manners into Sherlock.

Sherlock removed his black gloves and snapped on the latex ones Greg had provided. He moved the head of the shorter corpse right and left, and then carefully lifted the head. He leaned in closer and peered at the juncture where the neck met the back of the left shoulder. With his free hand, Sherlock first touched the skin at that juncture, then the skin a few inches away, and then repeated those motions again. He narrowed his eyes.

"This one's an Omega," he muttered.

"How did you-" Greg began, but Sherlock ignored him. He lowered the Omega's corpse and turned purposefully over to the other body. He immediately targeted its arms.

He lifted the body's right arm, inspected it briefly, and dropped it unceremoniously. He then began examining the left arm, looking closely around the wrist. As he did with the Omega, he touched a portion of skin, then another portion several inches away, and repeated. "Left-handed Alpha," he murmured.

Greg furrowed his brows in interest. "Care to let us in on what you've spotted?" he asked.

Sherlock pointed to the smaller body. "I needed to see if I could still see if the victims had any bondbites. A long shot, perhaps, but the sides and underside of the corpses have the least amount of damage from the flames. And oh, it's a good thing I checked. What I've found has given us an important clue about how the killer operates. It is difficult to see given the severity of the char, but there is a subtle difference around the skin and flesh at the neck. There is a 2.5 inch square there which has a deeper burn, implying there was no skin to burn through in order for the flames to reach the muscles and other tissues. In other words, consistent with skin removal. The lines of the cut seem clean, far too clean if it were done while the victim was conscious; therefore, it was most likely done post-mortem, although there's still the chance it happened while they were drugged. It also happens to be directly where an Omega's bondbite is typically found."

"Observe the same here," Sherlock said, lifting the arm of the corpse he was looming over. He pointed to a spot on the wrist. "This patch of burnt flesh is identical to the one on the Omega's neck. Same clean cut, same dimensions. However, this time it's where one would find the bondbite of an Alpha. While it's possible that these two may be unrelated, given that their bondbites have likely been taken as trophies, it is staggeringly unlikely. No. These must be the remains of a bonded couple. Go over missing persons reports, and I suspect these two shall be on the list."

"Huh," Greg remarked. "I wonder how long it would've taken for someone to spot that at autopsy."

"I shudder to even consider it," Sherlock said. "I'm going to take a few skin samples for testing, but after that, we're done here. Get out of that stupid outfit while I collect my specimens, Lestrade."

Greg backed away from bodies and quickly removed his own latex gloves. It didn't take him long to zip himself out of the suit, which he handed to the forensic detectives as they gingerly began to re-approach the bodies as Sherlock finished gathering his samples.

Greg watched the other Alpha stand and remove his latex gloves. The right sleeve of his coat sagged slightly, revealing part of the bondbite John had left there. Like all healthy bondbites it was deep red, the same hue as fresh blood, and even though it was put there ten months before, it was as clear and bright as if John had just bitten there. Greg saw Sherlock slip on his black gloves and rub at the spot on his wrist in what might have been his version of tenderness.

Greg looked down at his own wrist. These days, he usually covered it with a large wristwatch or long-sleeved clothing when he was out in public, but he'd been in too much of a hurry to leave Mycroft's place to remember. His wrist was bare, which put the mark of his broken bond on full display. The mark had faded immensely, so much so that the bottom was no longer visible at all. Only the top crescent was still present, and it was practically the same shade as his skin. It was slightly lighter, however – drained of its color. It was a pale, ghostly thing in comparison to the vibrant crimson mark on Sherlock's wrist.

The DI shoved his hand into his pocket. His chest ached whenever he saw his mark, and he burned with shame when he thought about it. But he wouldn't have to put up with it much longer. He would have a new mark soon, and his heart fluttered with hope that his new one would be brighter and stronger than the dead one had ever been.

Greg walked with Sherlock back to the entrance the building. With every step, he repeated that hope in his head. It bolstered his courage and when they were far off from the prying ears of Scotland Yard, Greg finally went for it.

"Listen, Sherlock," he said. "There was something else I wanted to talk to you about. Not case related."

"Make it fast."

Greg took in a deep breath. "Before I came here, I was with Mycroft…"

"No," Sherlock groaned, recoiling as if Greg had suddenly become toxic. "I don't want to hear about the horrible dalliances you have with my brother."

"- and while we were together –"

"Lestrade, there are all these… sounds… coming out of your mouth. Each is more terrible than the last. They need to stop."

"- we decided we want to get bonded!"

Sherlock responded with a rattling croak of misery, running his hands through his curly hair. "There's no accounting for your abysmal taste, but go ahead and bite him if it'll keep you from talking to me about it!"

It was no secret that Sherlock was exceptionally rude at the best of times and almost completely impossible when it came to matters concerning his brother, but this was above and beyond what Greg had expected. Irritated, he crossed his arms and scowled. "Well, that isn't up to you, is it? I was hoping you'd tell me who the Head Alpha of your family is, so I can ask them."

"I am," Sherlock growled. "It's me. Bite him if you must, but be aware that I'll be deleting this conversation and any subsequent reminders you or he decide to hurl at me."

"Nice try, Sherlock," Greg said. "I know that you used to be the type who'd pull a lie like that to try to cause a big, embarrassing social faux pas for Mycroft, but it's not going to work. I really thought you'd matured past that kind of thing. Just act like an adult for once and put aside this childish feud you love so much."

Sherlock froze. He straightened up, perhaps a bit stiffly, and met Greg's determined gaze. "You're that set on the dull, arbitrary, and outdated whims of society?"

"If society wanted me to wade through a pool full of snakes with my pants on my head, I'd do it if it meant I'd get to bond with Mycroft in the end. I just want all this bonding protocol stuff to be nice and official and respectable. It's what Mycroft deserves."

"'What he deserves'," Sherlock quoted quietly, his tone somewhat sarcastic. Louder, he continued, "Perhaps, in a way, we're in agreement on that. You want to dance to the ridiculous beat that is the Concurrence Act? Fine. I'll make sure that every last little detail gets followed to the letter."

Greg relaxed slightly. "Thank you for being sensible on this, Sherlock. So you'll tell me the name of the Head Alpha of the Holmes family?"

"I'll do even better than that. Come to Baker Street at 6:30 AM, which should be…" He glanced at his phone. "… six hours from now. You may chat with the Head Alpha to your heart's content."

"Isn't that a bit quick to arrange a meeting? I'd really prefer it to be some other time. It doesn't give me very long to prepare at all!"

"Believe me, that time will be very convenient."

Whoever the Head Alpha of the Holmes family was, they must have already arranged to meet John and Sherlock at their flat sometime prior. Maybe this really was the most convenient time for a meeting with them, and trying to arrange something else would be insurmountably difficult. The Head Alpha was a Holmes, after all, and Mycroft had warned about them being a little troublesome. Being tricky to handle was practically part of the Holmes family motto. "Well, alright then. And the Holmes' Head Alpha will be there? This isn't part of some prank?"

"Honestly, Lestrade, you were just complimenting me on behaving sensibly, as you put it. Make up your mind," Sherlock said. "But I can assure you with absolute certainty that he'll be there. Now, I really must be going. I want to run a few tests on this sample before you arrive for your little rendezvous."

"Right," Greg said. He attempted to thank Sherlock for arranging the meeting, but the consulting detective was already running off, past the open door of the building and out into the now pouring rain, likely to find a major street and a cab to hail.

Greg stood by the door a moment, just watching the rain fall and feeling a bit of the cool spray of the water even from the relative safety of the warehouse. Finally, he pulled out his mobile and sent a text to Mycroft.

Going back to my flat tonight. Meeting Head Alpha in morning. Might not make a good impression if he smells you on me. Even without sharing a heat, we HAVE taken pre-bonding liberties. – GL

He didn't expect a response, thinking Mycroft might have already gone to sleep. So he was a little surprised when, about twenty minutes later, his phone buzzed as he was supervising the removal of the bodies to the morgue for autopsy.

He already knows. Good luck. – MH

Greg suspected the brevity of the text was due to the fact that the "You'll need it" went without saying.

Author Notes:

Yeah, Lestrade got to be a bit of a dolt in this chapter. He'll get better.

In the next chapter, Greg gets a big surprise... or two. Which he really should have seen coming if he was a little more observant and less stubborn. Plus, a little more societal world building and how it may pertain to the case. Thank you all for reading and having patience since it looks like this thing may update a little slower than I'd like. Crit and comments are the absolute best, and I appreciate them all!