"Hello, Mr. Gregson."
"Hello, Jackie. How old are you now?" Gregson ignored the fact that the boy was currently half thrown over his father's shoulder and therefore upside down.
"Six!" Jackie declared proudly. "I'm practically an adult now!"
"Great," Lestrade declared. "Then you can get a job, and I can retire."
"What's retire?" Jackie asked. Lestrade sighed.
"It's when people can afford to stop working once they reach a certain age," he explained.
"When they get old?" Jackie wanted to know. "But you're old. Why don't you retire?"
Gregson looked away in an attempt to hide his smile. Tonight the rules of engagement were simple. So long as he followed them, he and Lestrade would both survive.
Rule one: be polite to Mrs. Lestrade and the children.
Rule two: don't antagonize Lestrade in front of his family.
The first rule was considerably easier to follow than the second. Years of animosity and rivalry between the two men made picking at each other almost a reflexive behavior, one that either could far too easily revert to without realizing it until after it had already happened.
"Mr. Gregson, good to see you again." Mrs. Lestrade welcomed the man as warmly as if he and her husband were best friends. Gregson managed a smile.
"Good to see you too, Mrs. Lestrade." He never quite knew what to do with himself at this point, and wondered briefly if any of the other Yarders had this problem.
Dinner was ready, however, and once at the table Lestrade could pretend to be wholly preoccupied with his meal while his wife coerced their guest into a steady stream of small talk.
"I miss Sophie," Olivia, the youngest of the Lestrade children, piped up halfway through dinner. "Where's Sophie?"
"She's at home with her mother and father, remember?" Mrs. Lestrade told her daughter.
"I miss her," the girl said again. "Can she come over again? Please?"
"I like Mr. Bradstreet," Jackie offered his opinion. "He lets me climb him like Da does. Did his wife come back and now she cooks for him and that's why he doesn't come over any more?"
"Mrs. Bradstreet was taking care of her father." Lestrade explained patiently without looking up from his plate.
"He get hurt or something?" Jackie wanted to know.
"He took ill," Lestrade told him.
The boy considered this. "But he got better?" Lestrade nodded. "But they can still come over sometimes, right? I like it when Mr. Bradstreet comes over. He's fun."
"We'll see," Mrs. Lestrade said. "Eat your dinner."
Jackie ate quietly for roughly three minutes before turning his attention back to Gregson. "Da got shot," he said, and the fair haired inspector tried to decide whether the boy was talking about some injury Lestrade had recently sustained and simply not mentioned, or if he were talking about that case six months ago when Gregson had practically dragged his semi-unconscious fellow inspector out of some god-forsaken back alley at three in the morning.
"Mr. Gregson knows, Jackie," Mrs. Lestrade told her son. "He was there."
"Ma thought he was going to die," the boy stubbornly persisted.
Gregson's mind blanked. He had no idea what to say to a six year old whose father had, in fact, nearly died after being shot that night.
Lestrade looked up. "Mr. Gregson is the reason I didn't die, Jackie-boy," he said. "He made sure I made it home, and made sure that the doctor fixed me up."
"Doctor Watson," Jackie grinned. "I like him." He looked back at Gregson. "You ever been shot?"
"Jackie!" Mrs. Lestrade stared at her son in horror. The boy's father remained unfazed.
"It's not polite to ask policemen-or soldiers-if they've been shot, Jackie, especially not at the table."
The boy's brows furrowed. "How come, Da?" he wanted to know.
"Because they might not want to talk about it."
"Because it's scary?" Jackie asked, his eyes wide as this new thought occurred to him. "Were you scared, when you got shot?"
By far the worst thing about having dinner with the Lestrades was being forced to watch the man admit to his children that he was, in fact, human. Gregson hated it. He hated feeling as if he were spying on the man, and he hated feeling sympathy for the man. He especially hated how much he had grown to understand Lestrade over the years.
"I had a job to do," Lestrade admitted as he and his son both grew serious. "So I didn't think to be scared right away. Later, though, when I had time to realize how much it hurt, and I saw how worried your ma was, then I was scared."
"Do you ever get scared, Mr. Gregson?" Jackie wanted to know.
The fair haired inspector regarded the young boy sitting in front of him. "Sometimes," he admitted, trying not to hate Lestrade all the more as he did so. "When I get hurt on the job. Or when someone else gets hurt on the job, sometimes I worry about them."
"Like when Da gets hurt?" Jackie asked.
"Sometimes," Gregson wouldn't lie to the child. "I've worked with your father for a long time, though. He's tough, so I don't always have to worry about him. A lot of the time I know he'll be okay."
"He's strong too." Jackie agreed. "Really strong."
"Very strong. Stubborn too." Too late Gregson caught himself, but Jackie looked only faintly surprised.
"That's what my ma says," he told the inspector. "Usually she says it when he's in trouble."
"Jackie." There was a warning in Mrs. Lestrade's voice, and the boy seemed to pick up on it.
Lestrade was slowly turning bright red.
In the interest of self-preservation, Gregson resisted the impulse to prod at the other man and instead ignored the comment.
By the time dinner finally ended, both men usually found themselves wishing they never had to see the other again. All the same, with the children sent up to bed and Mrs. Lestrade insisting she could manage in the kitchen perfectly well without her husband, Lestrade maintained that polite façade that he usually reserved for strangers and the nobility as he walked Gregson to the door, offered him his coat, and escorted him outside and down to the street.
Gregson could have thanked him for dinner; it was certainly true that Mrs. Lestrade was a fabulous cook. He could have brought up the shooting; there was still a lot unresolved between them after that particular incident. He could have tried to sort out the revelation that sometimes, yes, he did worry about the annoying little inspector standing beside him in the approaching darkness.
He did none of those things. Doing so would have broken the third and most important rule of the night: Never discuss anything that happens during dinner with the Lestrades. It was the only way for both men to survive without something cracking between them, and neither man could afford to fracture the at times admittedly openly hostile professional relationship between the two of them.
Lestrade did not speak either. Gregson suspected that without his children present, the man was no longer capable, after all that had happened, of coming up with something to say. The fair-haired inspector figured that was probably for the best.
They parted ways in silence, each knowing the other would pretend the evening had never happened.