The First Time…Greg Lestrade Met Mycroft Holmes
If he'd been at work Greg wouldn't have even looked.
Well, that's a lie. Greg would have looked. He definitely would have looked.
Tall drink of water. It's a trite old phrase but it's what the DI would have thought, it's what he did think the first time he saw Mycroft Holmes. He'd have thought His hair is different, his posture too, his eyes, nose, mouth…nearly everything's different. He's nothing at all like his brother and yet I knew who he was the second I saw him.
Yeah, so, Greg would have noticed Mycroft if he'd first met him at the Yard, of course he would have, but the phones (the god damn phones, he hates them), the tipping stack of case folders (crap was always falling out, he hates those folders), the incipient migraine he's always got (pretty soon Sherlock will figure that one out, stupid fluorescent lights flickering)…
Anyway. The point, and he has one here somewhere beneath the empty coffee cups and his creased suit jacket and the blizzard of notes for the last case…the point is that he didn't meet Mycroft at the Met and for that Greg is grateful because he wouldn't have had time.
Time to look. Time to really look and to see.
Because Greg sees, of course he does. He's not Mycroft, no. And he's not Sherlock, thank god. He's himself, a forty-something detective inspector who can see in a flash the almost painful rigidity in a man's spine, hear the words that don't come from that straight-lipped mouth, detect the real meaning behind the words that do.
He sees the way that man looks at his brother, with the barest flicker of a frown when the erratic man says something erratic, and then a nearly invisible smile when John Watson calls him on it.
And, of course, let's be honest, Greg sees something not many others have bothered to see. He sees a man with a dusting of faint freckles across his brow (yeah, Greg knows Mycroft covers them up with a touch of foundation; the Holmes boys are not, shall we say, precisely regular boys), broad shoulders, a tendency to talk to you through his lashes for Christ's sake, and that voice, that voice, like velvet, velve—
Yes. Well. Anyway. Greg didn't meet Mycroft at the Yard, he met him at 221B after a case was closed and it was for just five minutes—that's what Mycroft said (well what he actually said was "my driver is waiting Sherlock, must dash" as if his driver wasn't paid to wait patiently for her employer until Judgment Day), but five minutes turned into ten which ended up being forty-three ("My, I really must dash now, it's been forty-three minutes. So lovely to meet you Mr. Lestrade"), and at the end Greg went home smiling even though he'd actually spoken to Mycroft barely at all but still—
Look, sheesh, the point we're trying to make here is that the first time Greg met Mycroft they noticed each other, yes, they took the time to notice each other. And though it's been years since then, Greg remembers thinking at the time what he thinks to this day.
"You. So very much…you."
Wayoming wanted to know about the first time Greg met Mycroft. This is how it went from where I was standing. Of course your version may differ…
