Honestly, I have no idea what to call this. It's not a story. It's a meditation? A character study? Speculation? It's this thing. It's this thing about Lestrade and Mycroft and Sherlock. That little bit of a reveal in Hounds of Baskerville, when put together with so many other things, suggests so much. A calm understanding on both Sherlock and Lestrade's part that Lestrade is in some form of service/relationship to Mycroft, and that dealing with Sherlock is part and parcel of the deal. A clear sense that Lestrade isn't technically under Mycroft's command: that he's still a free agent in some ways. That the three men have something between them that's strong, and profound, and that John Watson has no idea of.

It's lovely and it's complex. And this little bit of weirdness is about that, combined with a sense of empty uncertainty about what happened to that when Sherlock "died." I have no answer. But the question resonates for me...

Alone in the Cage with Tiger

For years Lestrade had thought of himself as a circus animal trainer trying to manage two irritable, deadly cats. In his mind they were always a tiger and a black leopard—both solitary by nature, both territorial, both mercurial. Mycroft, of course, the tiger—more massive, the master of his jungle, greatest of all the great cats. Sherlock, though, was a compelling leopard: those who lived in leopard territory dreaded the hunter more than any other predator, for they were wily, and bad at boundaries. Sherlock's near-crazy capacity for obsession seemed to suit Lestrade's internal sense of a captive male leopard. A tiger? A tiger, somehow, seemed likelier to adapt. It might, in time, work with the trainer, even if it were never tame, even if in truth it worked to rule the ring. The leopard never would.

It was a conceit, of course. Animal trainers were not usually commissioned by joint agreement of the two beasts he commanded. Lestrade, though, still thought of it that way: he was a unique animal trainer chosen out of thousands by his own special tiger and leopard—the one trainer they would both allow to master and moderate the ring. The animal trainer who made it possible for them to share the ring at all.

Lestrade had an inner fantasy he would never tell anyone, which nonetheless lighted up the occasional moment over a pint. In it Mycroft, as a comic tiger, picked up an old-style desk phone and contacted Leopard Sherlock, who lolled on a tree branch looking dissolute and louche. "I've located a possibility," said Tiger Mycroft, tersely. "I need you to look him over."

"Will he give me work?" drawled Leopard Sherlock, staring out over the African veldt, searing the horizon with eyes of fire.

"He can be convinced."

"He'll do, then," Leopard growled. "No need to check for anything else."

"Check, or I shan't make the arrangements," Tiger replies, unwavering. He bats carelessly at a desk toy—a Newton's cradle—setting the shining steel balls into motion. "I'm not going to all the effort of finding him and fixing things with the Met if you haven't at least checked to be sure you can endure the poor man."

"You're such a fussbudget, Mycroft. Witter-witter-witter! I'm sure he's fine," Leopard says, sighing. "Checking him out will be dull."

"Do you want to work, Sherlock?"

Yes, Leopard wants to work. Lying on the branch is boring. The veldt is boring. He needs a better hunting ground—and Tiger is offering him one.

Tiger is a hard man. No one crosses Tiger, in the end, not even Leopard Sherlock…who yowls mournfully and drops from his tree branch, only to show up at Lestrade's London crime scene and proceed to drive everyone slightly mad. That was what that first time was like—the lithe young man stalking and swaggering and dominating the environment, waving around a clearance pass from so high up the chain of command it had to have been issued by someone wearing an oxygen mask. A sulky black leopard armed with a high-ballistic Belstaff coat he wasn't afraid to use. In the end Leopard texts Tiger, saying, "I told you he'd do," and Tiger responds, "I'll get it sorted, then. Don't make trouble for the poor man, Sherlock…" To which Leopard will not deign to reply, because trouble, like showing off, is what he does.

Lestrade had thought Sherlock a wonder and a marvel on first meeting him, there in the cold and damp of a February murder site. Then he met Mycroft, and had to recalibrate his standards. What do you make of a chubby, towering Tiger in pinstriped bespoke, with the prim manner of a stereotyped ponce, and an aura of power that made any such stereotype collapse instantly? Lestrade had heard people dismiss Mycroft Holmes, seeing only the finicky manners and the fussy fashions. Lestrade, though—he was one of the Met's best for a reason. It took only minutes in Mycroft's presence to recognize the predator within…the pinnacle predator of his ecosystem.

The elder Holmes was thinner, now, and older, but that only made it easier for others to see what Lestrade had seen from the first: the Tiger in grey flannel. The man only a fool will cross.

"My brother," he said in that first, historic meeting, "is an addict, with serious social issues that will not be easily managed. He is egocentric, melodramatic, neither empathic nor compassionate. He is also, however, a genius…a genius far better employed for the good of society than left on the sidelines, as his many flaws might normally ensure. If I make the arrangements with the Met's top administrators, would you be willing to suffer his involvement in your investigations? Do note, I use the term 'suffer' with full intent."

"You'll clear it with my bosses? That's a good trick," Lestrade had said. Had Mycroft not already impressed him he'd have chased him from the room already. As it was, he wanted to know how this "minor administrator" expected this game to work.

Mycroft shrugged. "Not…exactly. There are security issues, both on your side and mine. Your immediate superiors will remain ignorant. They will simply find it astonishingly difficult to pursue any serious investigation of Sherlock's inclusion to its logical end. They will find it harder still to censure you for it."

"Like wearing a bureaucratic stab-vest?"

The long, thin lips had quirked in a supercilious smile, acknowledging Lestrade's wit. "Quite. It won't stop a direct bullet at close range, but it will vastly improve your survival rate for most ordinary attacks."

Lestrade grinned. "Good trick. Any way to extend it to other peculiarities, or am I stuck with the regs the rest of the time?"

"I believe the answer is that you're stuck, DI Lestrade."

Lestrade chuckled and sighed at once. "Ah, well. Had to ask." He eyed the tiger standing in front of his desk warily. "So… tell me. Why should I say yes?"

"You mean besides your obvious desire to remain on the good side of a power in government?" Mycroft said, with a crooked grin and an arched brow that invited Lestrade to recognize his understanding that Lestrade was, in fact, largely indifferent to such sycophantic motives.

"Aside from that, yeah," Lestrade said, smiling back.

"Because…" Mycroft had paused, considering—Lestrade suspected that in that pause Holmes managed to evaluate a range of considerations most people would not take into account in their lifetimes, weighing himself, his brother, Lestrade, the needs of the Met, of London, of Great Britain all in precise, sensitive scales. After a time, he said, softly, "Because my brother is a gifted, glorious prat who can deduce the answers to many of the cases that would otherwise haunt you. Because…because he is beloved, even if he does not accept that, and I want to see him allowed to become something more than an addict racing to see if he can kill himself before he accomplishes anything useful in this life. Because he can serve, even if he can't serve with humility or grace."

"And why don't you arrange it yourself, then?" Lestrade asked, refusing to admit that the younger man's evaluation touched him on levels he didn't know how to describe. "Take him into your own work—and don't tell me you don't have the power. I won't believe you."

"He will not endure it," Holmes said, softly. "He'd force me to act, in the end. And…there would be no coming back from that. Some endings are permanent."

"Sounds lethal."

Mycroft's eyes were sad. "Only metaphorically. The actual end would come by way of a syringe in a filthy flat, I'm afraid. Or while performing some criminal act simply to alleviate the boredom. The important thing to understand is that he will not endure my authority, and I can't forsake that authority. Not even for him. Especially for him: that authority is all that's kept him alive, so far. He…meddles."

"In the affairs of wizards?" Lestrade said, laughing at Mycroft's sober delivery.

"Precisely," Mycroft said. "He loves risk. He fails to evaluate the likely consequences, though. The idea of subtlety and quickness to anger does not mean to Sherlock what it means to sane men. He would dance with dragons, given the chance."

Lestrade was struck by the anguish in the words—anguish pent tight, because Tigers don't cry, and never beg. "What do you want me to do?" he asked. "Really? Beyond letting him work as a consultant?"

"Help him."

"How?"

"Help me help him. He won't let me do it myself. Be my…proxy. Be the brother he can abide, rather than the brother he actually has."

"Spy on him?"

"No more than you'd spy on any young man whose family had good reason to worry over him. You need not betray him. But—" He closed his eyes, hid his face for a moment behind gloved hands. "If you could let me know if he's in trouble. Let me know if he looks like he's going to backslide. Let me know… Let me know how he is, perhaps? If he's well? Busy? Happy? It's more than I've often known for certain for over a decade."

Lestrade saw the parents of the runaways found floating on the top of the Thames. He talked to the friends of the prostitutes beaten to death in alleys. He heard the sobs of the mothers whose sons were lost to gangs, whose daughters turned to drugs. He knew the face before him.

"Am I going to regret this," he asked, knowing the tiger in front of him would hear his unspoken acceptance of the deal.

Mycroft's lips flicked in a rueful grin. "Probably. I'll try to ensure you don't regret it too much. Neither he nor I are easy people to deal with."

No. They were predators. Tiger and Leopard, pacing around each other, fighting for territory, fighting for dominance, fighting for shared love and fighting for independence from the burden of that love. And so they handed Lestrade the whip and the chair, and allowed him to manage them. He was their insurance—the promise that they would never come too close, or join together in real battle. He was their wall, their shield, messenger, their chosen master—in this, if in nothing else. He ruled at the raw and bleeding boundaries of their hearts. He stood between them, a living truce.

Things changed, after John Watson arrived. Finding a friend he didn't have to share, Sherlock was less trusting of the one who still stood between.

But still, they managed. Until Leopard jumped—and Lestrade was left alone in the cage with Tiger.