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In the days following the Eurus catastrophe, Lestrade saw quite a lot of Mycroft Holmes. That was no accident. Indeed, the entire silent world of secret agents and hidden powers seemed to have taken a great breath and decided that, whatever else, it could not permit Mycroft Holmes to go unobserved. To what degree that was benign concern, to what degree it was pragmatic panic, and to what degree it was vile, duplicitous plotting against the man who might, at any given moment, be the decision-making function of the British Government was anyone's guess. Lestrade suspected a bit of all of them, and probably several more motives beyond his own ability to conceive. It was enough as far as he was concerned that Lady Smallwood had greeted his own request that Mycroft be given support and attention by assigning Lestrade as his private bodyguard...an assignment that missed all logical points but one--that Mycroft might, possibly, permit Lestrade to hover, where anyone else but Anthea would be rejected outright. Even then....
"I do not require a bodyguard," Mycroft said, sitting primly at his desk, eyes fixed on his laptop screen, not on the man in the chair opposite him.
"Probably not, no," Lestrade agreed. "But everyone will feel better if you have one."
"I'm to be working with Lady Smallwood this week, reviewing the entire complex of systems making up our black-ops containment centers. Her security team should be sufficient, added to those who already keep watch over me."
"Could be. But you can't stay with her all the time." Lestrade risked a cheeky grin, adding, "People might talk."
For the first time since Lestrade had entered the room, Mycroft gave him his full attention, pale eyes distant and ironic. "They always do, but I hardly think it will prove a problem, all things considered. It might even be worth encouraging."
"Figuring your respective ages and sexual preferences will protect you? People like gossip, though, even if it's unlikely."
"People who know anything already know we've more than enough professional reasons to spend time working together. People who don't are welcome to consider any tawdry motivation they like--it only adds to the vast cloud of unknowing one attempts to maintain between the Great Work and the public eye."
Every word was crisp and precise. The intonations were posh-meets-ponce...refined to the aching point. Mycroft's face was still.
Lesser men, unobservant and unaware, might have thought Mycroft Holmes was a pillar of strength--unshaken, unshakable, unrattled in the aftermath of Eurus' game-playing. He was calmer than ever, and more distant. His stance, when he rose from his desk to pace, was like a ballerino's, a supple, floating column suspended from the heavens. His physical movements were birdlike, or reptilian--quick, alert, restrained, efficient. Precise.
Lestrade, watching him, found himself thinking of the theory that modern birds were really the evolutionary legacy of the dinosaurs. He could imagine Mycroft as a sort of brainy velociraptor covered in a suit of elegant black feathers--a predatory blackbird prowling the jungle night, silent in the shadows. Mycroft, in his current mode, projected an aura of danger, and of invincible strength. He wore that aura constantly.
Lestrade, in his new, temporary assignment, saw Mycroft step from his bedroom in the mornings already dressed in bespoke black pinstripe wool and self-created menace. Over the course of long days, he saw how seldom that aura wavered. It was the sort of performance that begged for little sensei alien gurus to mutter about how strong Mycroft was in the dark ways of the Force, or similar brooding, omen-filled babble. If Sherlock flapped and swept and staggered and swanned and sloped his dramatic way through life, chewing the scenery and rolling his eyes and monologuing like a Bond villain, Mycroft slipped like a rapier, silent, supple, resilient, and undefeated.
Except Lestrade knew that the strength was deceptive. Even the most flexible rapier will snap in conflict with a two-handed long sword. A sleek, smooth velociraptor can't overpower T. Rex. The dapper clothing, the perfect poise, the aura of invulnerability were all camouflage, protecting Mycroft from further conflict or abuse.
He was glad the other man at least had the sense to know he'd reached his limit. He wished that Mycroft understood that sometimes there was greater strength in bending with the wind, letting go of the tiger's tail, falling to the mat and staying down. All Mycroft knew to do was attempt greater and greater strength combined with greater and greater reserve and retreat, and starker silence.
He wished the other man had someone like John Watson. Flawed though the little Army doctor was, he met some silent need of Sherlock's. Together the two men had undergone an alchemical change that altered both. Sherlock, at least, was finally, clearly, the better for it--and if Lestrade was less sure of Watson, there was time for change to alter that, too. Now wasn't the time to attempt a final judgement on the man. Still, he could wish.
He tried to imagine Mycroft Holmes with friends--a little circle of people who cared about him, and whom he cared for in return. There was Sherlock--but that would always be an uneasy, painful alliance, marred by errors on both sides and made difficult by both brothers' pride. Anthea? She at least admired her superior and seemed professionally loyal--but it was hard to judge her personal commitment. Lestrade felt similarly unsure of Lady Smallwood, though he gave her extra points for warmth and the ability to read Mycroft better than most. He'd noticed that when the other man was at his most distant and fragile, she had a talent for adjusting the style of her interactions with him, encouraging more cups of tea and biscuits, or tumblers of single-malt whisky, and easing into light banter that occasionally won a surprised, wary smile from Mycroft. Beyond that, who was there? Mycroft put serious effort into discouraging social ties.
Moriarty had called Mycroft "the Iceman." Some fool in MI6 had code-named him Antarctica. Lestrade, though, saw him as a burn victim--a man sluiced in ice water to try to reduce the agony of flame. He needed the cool, he needed the isolation, he needed the peace, if he were to have any hope of healing.
Lestrade, knowing, proceeded from a position of respect for that injury--that strength protecting a greater weakness. If Mycroft could only accept a "bodyguard," that was where it would begin.
He was a clever bodyguard, though--cleverer than he allowed to show, just as he never allowed his fellow coppers at NSY to see his real depths. He knew the nature of the man he watched over perhaps better than anyone but Sherlock--and Eurus. He knew that the only way to lure the prey was to provide bait that appealed, or a trap the victim did not fear. Or both.
He learned the British Sign Language used in the Diogenes, so that day after day he could tell the attendants "No, thank you. Just send me to join Mr. Holmes in the Stranger's Room. I'll just sit over here and let Mr. Holmes get on with his work." Then he would sit in one of the big armchairs of the club, with a clear view of the room, including Holmes. He'd accept cup after cup of black Assam tea with milk and sugar, and as he sat he'd devote himself to quiet pastimes: sudoku, crosswords, but most of all to the racing papers. He would sit for hours, frowning as he jotted down racing information, checking it against data he pulled down from the internet, all of it jotted onto sheets of white Diogenes stationery using a cheap biro that skipped here and oozed there as he tried to reckon up statistics.
It was weeks before Holmes deigned to comment.
"You like to play the horses, Mr. Lestrade?"
"I like to place a pony on the ponies if the occasion seems to warrant it, Mr. Holmes," Lestrade replied, properly humble as he waved his sheet of calculations in the air. "No real talent for numbers, I'm afraid, and my winnings show it. As well I'm not a bookie--I'd be stony broke. As it is, I tell myself I'm just paying for my entertainment."
Holmes had been preparing to leave for the afternoon, but now he paused, and snatched the sheet from Lestrade's hand. He scowled at it. "Is there some reason you choose to forgo the calculating function of your smartphone, Mr. Lestrade? Or is there some valued point to handicapping yourself from the outset."
Lestrade ducked his head slightly, and gave his most open, gormless smile, all flashing white teeth and charm. "I forget, if you must know. Been trying to sort the stats out for years by hand, long before I could reach in my pocket and pull out a top-flight computer."
"You'd do well to change that." Holmes clucked, and drew a tidy sterling silver mechanical pencil from somewhere inside his tailored jacket. With no sign of thought, he sat again, this time in a chair beside Lestrade's. He fished in his jacket a second time and drew out reading glasses, then murmured, "Your racing papers--do you have any favorites you'd like me to take into particular consideration?"
Lestrade kept his mental glee to himself, instead just handing Mycroft the Racing News and the Guardian's racing section all folded up and grubby from use, with horses circled, and statistics underlined. Holmes looked, raised one brow, then took the papers and began jotting neat, tidy figures on the clean side of Lestrade's own sheet.
"How much can you safely wager?"
"Keep myself to a pony per week most weeks, with an extra tenner here and there as the chance wager comes along. Donovan owes me a tenner from a bet on Arsenal, but I've not been in to NSY since your little party at Sherrinford."
Mycroft looked up and frowned, studying Lestrade carefully. "Why do I think that a pony per week turns into three ponies--each with one bookie? And anywhere between a tenner and fifty pound outright on side bets among your peers?"
Another gormless smile seemed appropriate. "Might could be. I don't think about it too often."
In truth he thought of it all the time. It was part of his role--his cover. A bluff fellow's fondness for a bit of a bet on the horses, a wager with a colleague, a bar bet down at the pub. He'd started betting as part of the Great Game, back when he'd first gone undercover for MI5, and the activity fit, humanizing him, bringing him in contact with all sorts, leading people to underestimate him. But he knew, in his uneasy gut, that he liked it a bit too much--that like the undercover work, it appealed to the risk-taker and rule-breaker in him, and the insane optimist that let him convince himself that risks were worth running.
He lost too often. It was good for the strength and utility of his cover persona. Less good for his actual income.
Mycroft had already returned to the sheet of figures, the pencil flashing, tracking columns, writing out extensive formulae. He used his smartphone, too, puling in a range of data from all appearances.
"Sweet Molly--I see you bet your sentiments, not your statistics," he commented, as he sorted out Lestrade's favored horses.
"She's got long odds of winning. Put ten on her and get back a few hundred if she crosses first."
Mycroft clucked his disapproval. "Yes--but that's because the odds of her winning for you are obscenely low. If you must bet her, bet her coming and going. The odds of her losing are better than those on her winning, and she could at least bring you in even."
"Where's the fun in that?"
Mycroft sighed, and handed back the sheet, now covered with tidy figures, and concluding with a list of horses and betting amounts at the bottom. "Here. Bet this line-up at your bookie's tonight. By the end of the week you should have a neat little profit. Very little, mind you, but you'll come out ahead, and I suspect you will have as much fun as you'd have had with your own figures."
As it happened, Lestrade was twelve pounds better off as a result. He made sure to tell Mycroft, and to suggest that he'd accept any tips Mycroft had to offer. He'd then ignored the other man, focusing on Sudoku.
"If you have no particular talent for numbers, I fail to understand why you choose to invest either time or money with your usual activities," Mycroft said in exasperation, as he corrected one of Lestrade's charts. "Or take up something over which you have at least some control."
The next week Mycroft himself brought a small box with him. It was worn. The ancient, corrugated cardboard had developed a satiny nap after years of use and storage. There were traces of children's crayons on the outer faces of the box, and a small heap of children's games inside.
"The box is mine," Mycroft murmured, unpacking it. "The artwork and damage to the container, Sherlock and Eurus.' But don't try to make out much of their efforts. It's mainly smudge and wear, now." He placed the contents on the small card table in the Diogenes' smoking room. There was a battered plain wood box. Beside it he placed a larger, more ornate box covered in worn, half-rotted crimson leather. He picked up the smaller box and opened it, showing how it unfolded into a long, slim board drilled with holes.
"Cribbage?" He offered. "Or backgammon," he added, gesturing at the larger box.
"Cribbage," Lestrade responded. "It's a quiet game."
From there on they exchanged a game quite commonly.
Lestrade came to know the shape and form and shadow and silhouette of Mycroft's long-fingered hand. He learned the odd rules, and watched the lazy parade of the pins around the cribbage board. They drank tea, and discussed very little, besides Lestrade's improved win-rate on the horses, and his failure to return to his team in the MET.
"You should have played piano," he said one night.
Mycroft, without thinking, then told him stories about lessons forced upon an unwilling boy, lessons abandoned. About dance lessons. About loneliness. They played day after day, night after night, usually in the Diogenes' Stranger's Room, with the big bay windows facing out onto the street beyond, and the fire burning in the fireplace.
"Backgammon," Mycroft murmured one evening, pulling in his last pieces.
"You're too good. I need you to handicap yourself."
Mycroft demured. "I have so few areas of strength. Better to retain my advantage."
Lestrade didn't argue with him. Instead he said, "Then keep the pot sweet. Losing is only so much fun."
The next night Mycroft brought in a Snakes and Ladders board. "Almost pure luck" he said, with the shy, quiet smile Lestrade considered uniquely Mycroft's own.
It leveled the playing field. Soon Lestrade learned that Mycroft swore like an irate squirrel when the dice dumped his player down a snake, but gave the most obnoxious little smirk when chance permitted him to climb a ladder.
"Sherlock and Eurus and I could play these games together," he said once, his voice for a change free of tension, as though he'd been carried back to a rare point of safety in his own memories. "I was old enough to make Eurus stick to the rules and play with honest dice. She cheated at Go Fish."
They played more games, spreading their skill sets. Board games. Card games. No trivia, no puzzles--Mycroft ate those for breakfast and was left ravenous for real competition. It was the games of luck, or mixed luck and skill, that proved companionable, with pure skill like betting the horses or playing Sudoku turning into areas where Mycroft became the advisor.
By then there was no real pretense that Lestrade was Mycroft's "bodyguard." Not that it was stated outright. But it was understood.
"Gin," Mycroft would murmur, laying down the last of his cards.
"Well, bugger," Lestrade would grumble, and pour them both tea.
And, over tea and cards, they both lay down the burden of strength and were two weak and human men, together, in the quiet of the Stranger's Room, by the crackling fire of the lounge.