Archive of Our Own

When he is five years old, he is small and dark and speaks with a slight stutter, but his words are so polite that most overlook the repeated consonants (always the T’s, the S’s, the M’s, the N’s).

When he is five years olds, he picks all of his mum’s daisies and proudly delivers them, roots and all, to the pianist at his church. It is a small enough town that he knows where she lives, just a few blocks from the park, and he walks there all on his own and thinks himself quite independent. She is perhaps 30 years old, and she has auburn hair and he thinks that, besides his own mum, she is the most beautiful woman in the world. He tells her so and when he presents the daisies, she laughs like bells and takes his hand, saying, “Why, thank you, sir.”

He has never been called “sir” before, but he has heard people calling his da that, so he knows it is a very special thing indeed.

When she drives him home that day and waits with him on the stoop until his mum opens the door, teary and worried (and perhaps upset about the daisies, he thinks), the lovely lady with the musical laugh gives him a kiss on the cheek and he thinks he might burst.

Even with the harsh words his mum and da give him that night over a cold dinner of peas and yesterday’s corned beef hash, he still thinks it was worth it.

His brothers and sister tease him, of course, when he tells his family at the breakfast table the next day that he is in love with Miss Charlotte from church and that they are going to get married.

“You can’t marry her, moron,” Sean sneers. “You’re a baby and she’s old.”

“Sean, watch your language around your little brother. Don’t call him a moron.” His da says over his newspaper.

“I’m n-n-not a baby.” He frowns. “I a-am five.”

“Jesus, pardon me, then.” He rolls his eyes. “Besides, she’s married anyway, Greg, and she has a baby.”

Greg responds by flicking some of his eggs at him over the table, which misses Sean and hits his da instead. His da just sighs and wipes it off. “Greg, go to your room.”

“’M s-sorry, ‘m s-so-sorry.” He immediately begins to sob, more out of frustration than anything else, because he was in love and Sean just wouldn’t see, and he wants everyone to stop treating him like he’s a little child; he’s tired of his brothers and the boys down the block ganging up on him when he walks home from school and make fun of his stutter and muddy up his clothes so that when he gets home, mum tells him off for getting his uniform dirty again, and it just isn’t fair at all.

His sister Joanna is the oldest of the family, fifteen, and she has the most patience for her littlest brother, mostly because she finds him cute still and he listens to her and even sometimes lets her put him in her heels and dresses (but don’t tell anyone that), so she eventually gives Sean a withering look.

“Sean, just piss off, will you?”

“Joanna Frances Lestrade, you watch your language at the table!”

“Yes, mum. Sorry.”

But Jo is fifteen and Sean is only ten, so what she says has to go. Greg should feel victorious, but the uncomfortable silence feels suffocating, at least until Will, thirteen and looking gangly and awkward already, arrives, and trips over himself and that makes them all smile, a bit.

That night, he wakes up at the sound of footsteps, so he crawls out of bed and peers out of his open door. He doesn’t know what time it is, but he wishes he still had a nightlight, even though he told his mum that he wasn’t afraid of the dark anymore, so he doesn’t need one. He can’t see anything at all, so he creeps into the kitchen and sees the light of a torch flickering about. His breath catches in his throat, because either there’s been a blackout again and that’s his father searching for candles, or there is someone in the house who does not want the lights on.

The light suddenly shines on him and he makes a startled yelp, but he then is determined to put a brave face on, so he looks down the barrel of the torch at the shadowed men and shouts “stop you can’t be here this is not your house go away— Da!”

When one of the men reaches out to clamp a hand over his throat or his mouth or his eyes or whatever, he shouts, “Da! Mum! Help me!” and falls over backwards trying to run away. His father rushes out of the room without his dressing gown and armed with a cricket bat. The man holding Greg’s shoulder drops him to the floor and scampers off, and his father goes after him, enraged. Will, still drowsy, in only his shorts and an undershirt, follows suit, leaving a dazed five-year-old to ponder what had just happened, alone, on the floor, in the dark, without his slippers.

It isn’t until his mum wraps her thin arms around him and rocks him, saying, “it’s okay, baby, it’s okay” that he begins to cry. (He would later say very, very similar words to a distraught Sherlock Holmes, who had been very clearly dead for three years before John Watson goes missing from his Weighhouse Street flat.)

The next day (or perhaps, more accurately, later that very same one), when the police are mulling about the house examining the broken window and the mess, and questioning the burglar caught by Mr. Lestrade, he realises he has not stuttered once since the incident.

He decides then he will become a policeman.

When he brings flowers to the next woman he is in love with, he would decide yet again that he would someday marry her.

This time, he buys roses rather than picking daisies, and he is sixteen and she is lovely and her name is Juliet. She is not the first girl he has kissed, but she is the first girl he’s said, “I love you” to and meant it. She says he’s the most honest man she’s ever met, and he likes that she calls him a “man” instead of a “boy”, and that she doesn’t even care about Sean being in gaol and never compares him to Will, who will take over the Lestrade construction business even though he’s smarter than hell—too smart for construction jobs—or talks about how well Jo must be doing with her family in the States, with her banker husband and her two little children, whom Greg never sees or hears from.

She is beautiful, and he tells her every chance he gets that he loves her because he thinks he means it then, and even now, when he looks back on it, he meant it as much as a teenager can.

Juliet holds him close to her breast and he listens to her heartbeat and the sound of her breaths.

Soon, but not so soon, they are almost-dancing on the kitchen tiles of an awful, tiny flat in the middle of Tottenham, and she is putting herself through teaching school and he’s at Hendon, and though their futures then seem far away, if only just in reach, they are happy.

He asks her to marry him when they are still barely children, at twenty-one both, and she kisses him so hard she bruises him, and they both cry, just a little. He is a PC by the time they are married, if only newly minted, and he gets some celebratory claps on the back, some pints, some subdued glances from older officers who have seen ambitious and optimistic young men like him wander down this path before, and they know he will one day have to make a choice (but not now, not now—now, they will be happy for handsome, sarcastic, dedicated, loyal, honest Greg Lestrade and his beautiful young wife).

They fight some, and he rises through the ranks not as fast as he’d like, but faster than what would make sense. People like him. He’s smart enough, but not too smart—not so smart that he puts people off.

But more often than not, he comes home to a wife staying late at school or to a stack of ungraded papers, and the lines born every day on her face are visible but endearing, to him.

The fights are becoming maddening. The smallest things. He has such a temper some times, just like Sean, just like Will, just like Jo—and yet, their feet do not ache as they walk the streets and they do not see the body of a drug addict in the corner. He sees those things, and what’s worse, he has come to expect it. He resents his wife’s job as a teacher sometimes, because teenagers are terrible, but at least they are not often rioting and being beaten down in Brixton, or lying face-down in a gutter in Croydon with knives in their guts.

When she mentions that she’s been considering going to Africa to teach English to youths, he wholeheartedly supports it, even if it means she’ll be gone for a year and a half to two years, and he’ll be alone for the first time in his life. She’s worried, in her eyes, he can see, that he will cheat on her while she’s away, but he’s an honest man, and he tells her he won’t, and hopes she believes him.

Juliet has been gone fourteen months when he sees the body of little Claire Jameson, a six-year-old girl torn apart by her stepfather in a fit of pique. He’s twenty-six, hardly a rookie anymore, and she is the smallest body he’s ever seen, but not the first murder victim. But he’s never seen such a little child on the floor, surrounded by caution tape. Teenagers are different. But she is hardly more than a baby, and it makes him want to vomit.

“An accident,” the man, the one who was supposed to keep her safe, her stepfather—that’s what he kept saying, “I was drunk” as the police rush in and find him huddled over his stepdaughter’s mangled corpse, and “I didn’t mean to” he weeps into the arms of his arresting officer and “oh god I’m so sorry oh God Claire!” he cries, as he’s driven away amidst a storm blue and red lights and sombre, unsympathetic faces.

Lestrade, only a last name by then, a T/DC on not-his-first crime scene, cries alone into his phone that night to his wife in Uganda who is tired and achy and hot. He’s too old to be doing this, to be sobbing and stuttering and whimpering, but he feels as though there is too much maturity and too little youthfulness in the world at that moment and he needs to be held and loved like a child, like the five-year-old he was once, the one who decided to become a policeman after he was truly brave for the first time. He hates that five-year-old at that moment, because a child was braver then than he is now.

“Honey, it’s okay, it’s okay. There’s nothing you could have done.”

“But s-s-she was s-s-so little.”

It is on days like this that his stutter sometimes comes back.

“I have to go, darling, it’s almost time for class, but know it wasn’t your fault.” She begins to leave. He can hear her bag snap shut, papers filed away, a jacket pulled on.

Quickly. “I love you.” He says, to catch her before she hangs up. In case she doesn’t remember, or doubts it for some inexplicable reason, or she forgets during her short walk between her little cottage and the decrepit school, or he dies like that sweet little girl before he can talk to her again.

Pause. And then. “Love you, too.”

There is nothing.

He calls his mother that night, too. He’s drunk by then, completely plastered, alone in his empty bedroom. “Mum, I can’t do it anymore. I can’t keep going. I’m sorry. I’m so, so s-so-sorry.”

“Greg? For God’s sake, sweetheart, it’s eleven o’clock at night. What the bloody hell could prompt you to call so late?”

“The little girl, mum. T-the little girl.”

“Who?”

“She’s dead.”

“Who’s dead?”

“The little girl.”

“Yes, you said. Whose little girl?”

“The killer’s little girl. He killed her. I can’t go to church anymore, m-m-mum. I’m sorry. Tell Da, will you?”

“Honey, I don’t understand—what little girl?”

“She was s-six. Claire. Her s-ste-stepfather killed her. I saw. Saw her body, I m-mean. I was th-there at the s-scene t-today.”

“Oh, honey, that—that happens sometimes. And I know it’s a horrible thing. You know that's what you were going to have to see at some point when you decided to take a position with Serious Crimes. You've always wanted to be a detective. But I know. It’s just awful, but she’s safe now. Jesus will take care of her. She’s with God now, honey.”

“No!” He shouts into the receiver with such force, it surprises him. “He can’t have let—n-no god would do that. Mum, He can’t—He’s not…for fuck’s sake! N-no loving and all-seeing God would allow a little girl to—”

“Stop it, Greg. And don’t use language like that. You know that He has a path for all of us, and sometimes, things happen that we can’t understand. She’s with Him in Heaven and—”

“Good night Mum.” He cuts her off, not trying to be rude, but he’s just so, so tired.

“Greg! Greg! Stop!”

“Love you. T-t-tell…tell Da, won’t you?”

“Greg!”

“I love you.”

He hangs up the phone and gets far drunker than he could ever have gotten at a time when he cared and it is March 24, now. He is 27 today and feels nothing.

Juliet spends a year in London, and then goes back to Africa, this time, to Angola. When she returns, she is different. He doesn’t know how or why. He is now a DS, and his life is stressful, but he loves his job, even though he has seen far more bodies than he ever would have wanted to. Even so, he loves the feeling he gets when he knows he has gotten his man (or woman) and someone is safe and some poor sod’s soul might be at rest. He loves his wife, too, and he tries to make himself believe that she loves him too, even if her love doesn’t reach her eyes or face or lips the same way his does.

Even if he does not believe in God, he believes in souls, and he knows he has one because six months after his wife has returned from Angola, she tells him that she is five weeks pregnant and he presses his ear to her belly, hears nothing, but cries anyway. There have been many tears in this marriage of almost ten years, now, but very few of them have been of happiness.

He thinks about dancing on yellow-and-white checkerboard tiles in Tottenham, and now, he lives in South Kensington in a terrace house that’s expensive, but with his wife, he can afford it. He lives (no, he doesn’t live there; he and Juliet and this baby of theirs live there together, and they will be happy).

When the baby is born, she is lovely, with reddish-brown tufts at the top of her head, blue-brown eyes (Lestrade eyes, his mum says, just like Jo’s kids, just like Will’s kids), and they name her Annabel after her grandmother. Annabel Leah Grace Lestrade, and she is so beautiful. He holds her in his arms with all the gentility unexpected from a man whose job it is to hold a gun and shoot when necessary. Those hands have killed. Those fingers are callused and rough from fighting and pulling triggers. There are scars from powder burns. And yet, here he is. Not yet grey, but greying, and Juliet is smiling over sweat and deep bags under her eyes, and they are a family, now.

She grows quickly, too quickly for his likes. Her big eyes go to their permanent chocolate colour, and her hair stays mostly auburn, and her nose is freckled but not the rest of her face, but he couldn’t care less about what she looks like, because she’s his baby, and he loves her for it.

His job takes all his time away from her. On weekends, he takes her to the park and sits and watches the people go by, because they both need a bit of a relaxation. As they walk, just father and tiny daughter, he points out all the parts of this city he loves—“see there, Annie? That’s the Peter Pan statue. We’ll read Peter Pan. You can be Wendy. You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Wendy? Do you want to be called that for a while?”

Juliet gets upset with him when she hears him call her Wendy. He explains that it’s a pet name, just a nickname, but she doesn’t care.

She says that if he had wanted to name her Wendy, he should have said so in the hospital. He does not call her Wendy anymore, except for sometimes, in his mind.

Juliet records her first steps, her first words, her first everything as best she can, but there are pieces missing. He knows his wife resents his absence, as though, by not being there, he is taking some of her childhood away.

Juliet is not the one who is there when she gets sick—really sick, for the first time. That is one of the few “firsts” he is privy to. She is six, almost seven, and has all the daintiness of Juliet and all the stubbornness of Greg, and as headstrong as she is, he knows there is something wrong with her when she stumbles to him at four in the morning. Juliet is away visiting her sister in Dorset. He has been on leave for two days after getting a concussion (admittedly, it was his own fault. It was icy and he was running after a suspect, and trying to take him down on a patch of black ice was not exactly the smart thing to do, regardless of the presence of two constables rounding the corner).  

His head pounds as she teeters next to him (daddy, daddy, daddy, please, it hurts) and his breath catches in his throat. Her voice is slurred; she is swaying as she stands and her eyes are hollow and drooping. “It hurts” are the two most terrifying words a parent can hear from his or her child. There is something wrong with the child, and he doesn’t know what it is, but his baby is in pain and there is nothing he can do about it.

Her forehead is burning; she vomits and shakes, and within minutes, she is passed out on the bed. Her fever is too high, too high, and he cradles her in his arms and sits in the shower with all the ice they have in the house with the water blasting on the two of them. He rocks her back and forth, singing every damn song he can think of, just to get her to wake up (normally, he sings to get her to sleep, and even in the ice-shower, he recognizes the bitter irony).

She blearily wakes up briefly and he runs her to the A&E three blocks away, ignoring the staring looks of the few passersby. It is not often that a haggard thirty-five year old man carries a small, semiconscious child down the street as both are dripping wet, on a clear night, nowhere near a pond, river or lake.

Juliet arrives back from Dorset five hours after receiving the call from Greg in the A&E. He puts on his DS voice and tries to keep her calm. “No, honey, she just came to me. No, I don’t know if it is related to her cold. She was complaining of a headache, she vomited several times. She did not have this high of a fever when she went to bed. She hardly had a fever at all. She said she was not hungry. It can’t have been something she ate. I made sure she’s been drinking water. She had a late lunch, no dinner, went to bed at around six because she was tired and she said the light made her eyes hurt. They’re running the tests now. We’ll know soon.”

She’s unconscious and has not woken up since he ran her out the door of their home. A doctor rushes in and looks at the wound on his head.

“Mr. Lestrade—”

“Detective Sergeant.” He says automatically, bites his lip and regrets it, but says nothing. He’s a father here, not a detective.

“Did you have a head injury recently?”

“Yes, two days ago. A concussion.”

“We have to isolate her from you. I’m sorry, but—”

“Hold the fuck up. Why?”

“The tests. Meningitis.”

“I’ve had my shots. So’s she. Run the tests again.”

“No, sir, we’re sure. It’s an extremely aggressive form of meningitis called Gram-negative meningitis, caused by what we believe is a kind of bacteria called enterobacter aerogenes. She probably caught it at school, but she’s a weakened immune system, doesn’t she?”

“She’s had a cold for about a week. A minor cold. Nothing big.” He looks at the doctor with big, frightened eyes. A man who has been up against mob bosses, murderers, serial killers, the lot—frightened by a little girl.

A whirlwind parks itself next to him. Juliet has arrived back. No makeup, barely brushed hair, still in pyjama pants and looking beautiful. He sees something on the corner of her neck, but does not comment on it. He barely even takes in the information. Right now, his baby is sick and his wife is here, holding his hand, and he takes a deep breath.

“She’ll be okay, then? Meningitis—yeah, my friend Rich had it when we were kids. They got it in time. That’s the key, yeah? Early detection?”

The doctor has a grim face. “That was most likely for viral meningitis, which has a 2% fatality rate. Gram-negative has between a 40% and 80% fatality rate.”

Greg blanches. “Well, which is it? That’s a pretty wide margin, mate.”

“For a child this small, this young…judging by the symptoms—I mean, it would not…I wouldn’t want to make definite guesses; people have surprised us before. But…”

“For fuck’s sake, just spit it the fuck out!” Juliet cries, always a keeping her volume in check—she is a teacher, after all.

“I would not expect her to last through the night. If she survives until tomorrow morning, I might be able to give you a more definite answer. For now, we have her on a Cefepime antibiotic regimen and we’re keeping her hydrated, as well as giving her a mild sedative to keep her from going into convulsions.”

Greg looks over at her, sleeping almost peacefully, in her bed. “Fuck it, I’m going in there.”

“Sir, you can’t. Recent brain injuries heighten the risk of contracting meningitis exponentially.”

He looks at the doctor, who is an older woman, but looking flustered all the same. He knows her pain. Telling parents bad news about their child will never be easy. It is only now that he’s stopped seeing every body at a crime scene as some variation of Annabel (that teenage boy is what Annabel could look like if she were a black male; that woman there could be Annabel with a little plastic surgery, a little older; that child there on the hospital bed could be Annabel—she is Annabel).

He looks back at the doctor with a sobering stare. “Well, quick treatment is key in this sort of thing, isn’t it?”

Sitting by her side, he calls the office and takes another day of leave. He does not say why. Concussions are easier to explain. They are commonplace and simplistic. Something like this. A child’s survival questionable and inconstant. That is complex and pretty in an intricate, delicate way.

When she dies, she looks peaceful, beautiful, almost. It is the late afternoon and sunlight streams through the windows. She is surrounded by white sheets and beeping machinery, and he is reminded of sea foam and white sepulchres. He holds her as tight as he can and thinks bitterly about post-mortem bruising and his wife just sits there with her head in her hands, sobbing (“my baby, my baby!” she wails). The doctor stands in the doorway, watching in silence, as Greg lies down next to his daughter, holding her for the last time, eyes closed, and for a second, a passerby might think they were both asleep, except for the tears.

After the funeral, Greg Lestrade will not cry in front of another person again until the day before John Watson dies. He is no longer “daddy” or “da” or “papa” or any variation thereof. His wife no longer calls him by any endearing pet names. He thinks about staying with his parents for a while—Juliet is off with her sister again, just trying to catch her breath, get her bearings, but instead, he stays alone in their emptying home, with sympathy cards and flowers.

Six months later, he is promoted to Detective Inspector, and he comes home to an empty house and a separation agreement. He moves into a flat in Clapham, and it’s not much but it’s more than enough; he’s lonely but doesn’t want anything to fill the void(s) left by Annabel (and Juliet, he supposes—he remembers the marks on her neck and thinks back to all those late nights grading papers and classes at the gym and long walks and can’t bring himself to care).

He loves her, his wife, but, in fairness, his love is a bit skewed. Instead of wallowing in alcohol, which he does do, on occasion, he throws himself into his work.

There is no more Greg. There is only DI Lestrade, now. He does not have a first name. He does not have a wife or a daughter, only case after case and those do not bring you tea when you are having a rough day (or know that in all actuality, you have betrayed your true English nature and prefer coffee), and they do not whisper I love you at night, especially not when you fall asleep on your desk and wake up with ink stains embarrassingly displayed across your cheek.

It has been ten months since his life, his darling, his Annabel, died in the hospital. It has been four months since he came home to no one and moved out to no one. They are not divorced. He does not think they will ever be divorced, because that seems so resolute and they are so twisted and bent—far more than is healthy for them. Any resolution would be too good for them. Too hackneyed. Too sensible.

He tries to figure out a reason, but he can’t. It pushes him further from his god, because it must have been angels who were jealous of how lovely his little girl was to allow something so violent to happen. It wasn’t perfect, but they were happy then, and so Heaven had to tear them apart.

She is not in Heaven now, because Heaven destroyed her, and he would not want her to be there. And daughters always mind their fathers—at least, until they become rebellious teenagers. But Annie died before then, so she thought the sun set on her father’s say-so, and he protected her and she could never be hurt with her arms around his head and from her vantage point, sitting high atop those broad shoulders.

He loved her with a love more than love, and so some unexplainable force had to take it away. Seraphs or gods or cherubs or demons—it doesn’t matter. He is alone. They are both cold. They share in death equally. She has the physicality of such grave quietus, and he suffers the mentality. They are both chilled and killed, his Annabel, his little Wendy-girl.

Nights are the worst. When he gets rare sleep, curled up around emptiness in a too-large bed, he has nightmares. Not a night goes by where he does not think of his beautiful Annabel Lee Grace.  

Annie, Annie, Annie, Annie, he thinks, as he gets up from his often-cold bed in the morning.

Annie, Annie, Annie, Annie, he thinks as he stands in the Tube, grasping hollowly at metal bars and trying not to spill coffee on those around him.

Annie, Annie, Annie, Annie, he thinks, as he stands over the body of Someone’s Child, and considers how quick it would be to meet her wherever she—

“He was an investment banker. This wasn’t a mugging, even though you won’t find his wallet with the body. Loads of money, public schooling, probably, but he’s foolish with his cash. This isn’t a person who recently climbed up the ladder—no, he was born into money and landed this job to furnish an extravagant lifestyle that he was accustomed to. He’s been out of town recently, most likely somewhere equatorial—if I had to guess, somewhere in the Caribbean, judging by the depth of the tan and the slight rash on his arms near the wound. Tan is uneven, but the fact that there is a tan at all suggests that he mixed business with pleasure—that mark on the back of his neck would imply the same as well, so—”

“Who the fuck are you?” Lestrade asks wearily, looking up at the gangly, shoeless young man, very young, sitting on a wall at least eight feet high. The barely-a-man’s clothes are expensive, but they’re ruined. Seems he’s used to an extravagant lifestyle too.

“Doesn’t matter. Aren’t you morons listening to me? I’m saving you time and effort; God knows that you lot wouldn’t lift a finger to solve a murder without it being gift-wrapped to you—”

“All right, we don’t need sods like you hanging about crime scenes. PC Thornton, PC Hatcher, please escort this man off the premises and—hang on, are you high?”

“Mm, I suppose that some might consider this to be high. It’s eight feet and I’m a bit over six feet tall on my own.”

“Hatcher, Thornton, get this fucker down from there, and check him for intoxication and narcotics. If he’s tripping, put him in holding overnight; I want to question him as well.”

“And if we find something on his person, sir?”

“Then book him for possession. Don’t bother if he’s just been using. We have enough issues as is.”

“You’re wasting a valuable resource. This is wholly unnecessary—watch that, you idiot—” The man says, not quite struggling, as Hatcher tries to cuff him and drag him off.

Lestrade turns back to his crime scene and desperately tries to squelch the urge to smoke.

“I’ve a cigarette, if you want one, detective,” the man from the fence offers.

“I don’t think a cigarette will put you in good favour. So what are you on? You’re too jumpy for heroin. Coke?”

“You haven’t been a DI for very long, have you? Don’t bother responding; I never ask questions I don’t already know the answer to. Mm, less than a year, if I judge correctly. Going through some marital issues, are you? Telltale sign, right there, on your ring finger. You’ve worn a ring there, ten or more years, but you’ve removed it sometime in the past five or six months, so probably coinciding with your promotion. Ah. So the wife is resentful of your success. Most likely a teacher or social worker—not much room for improvement or promotion in her field, but no, that wouldn’t end your relationship with her. You’re obviously a devoted man, if your work ethic is to be judged, so infidelity is out of the question, at least on your part. You hardly have time to go home to your wife as it was, so naturally there’s no chance for you to keep up an affair. Though how someone could even stand to work with a man as dull and boring as you is a wonder, much less marry one. No, whatever it was that ended your marriage and caused your divorce—”

“Separation, actually. We’re just taking a break.”

“Mm. And this man here is just ‘taking a break’ from breathing. Tell me how that goes, then, will you?”

“All right, I’ve had enough of this clot; Hatcher, put him into the car.”

Hatcher is no where to be seen, and the shoeless man is now by Lestrade’s side, and drops the cuffs into Lestrade’s jacket pocket.

“That would be ambitious of him, wouldn’t it? Not to worry, I’m almost done here. Not much to see. Open and shut revenge hit, wouldn’t you say? I would say the secretary’s husband would be a good bet, and I am not a betting man—I always win.”

Hatcher is back. “Hey! What the fuck did you do my cuffs, you fucking twat?”

“Eloquently said, PC Hatcher. Yes, as I was saying, though, detective, something big had to have made her up and leave you. The tension’s been building for some time, though, so probably a string of affairs that you’ve been too blind to notice until now—oh, what’s this?” The junkie is staring at him closely. “So you did notice, but you just put off confronting her until recently. So you really love her. That’s rather touching, if I cared for such sentiment. The promotion is just the final straw—she blames you for something, something big. Professional woman, in her mid-thirties, judging by your age, both having stressful jobs. Something…something…”

Lestrade isn’t saying anything anymore, not looking anywhere but at the body on the ground and thinking about Claire Jameson torn apart, years and years ago, but Claire has Annabel’s face and she isn’t wearing shoes either, like this man.

The entire scene is silent. They all know. They’ve all known for so long, for over ten months, but no one has said anything.

“Ah. That must be it. A child. Something about a child. Recently, too. Young, because your job doesn’t allow for much time to raise a family, so you would have elected to wait, even if you married your wife early. So she’s spent years alone. No wonder she took a few lovers on to keep her company. No, but there’s no indicators of children recently, so you haven’t seen the child in a long time. You’re not the sort to abuse a child; I see the way you stare at that body in that sickening manner. Someone’s son, was he? Well, yes, but he was also a philanderer and an extortionist, quite possibly related to organised crime, so it must make it all okay to damn him to hell. But that child. Yours, not a niece or nephew. You smell slightly of alcohol but you’re not inebriated, so you were drunk recently but not on the job. So that’s it. You’re mourning. The death of a young child. Sudden, too, if I’d have to say, and your wife blames you. Sentiment. Caring. So pedestrian. Obvious you didn’t physically hurt your child, probably an illness or an accident, but she considers your negligence to be the root cause of the death. Mothers always seem to overreact. But why should you still be upset? It’s obvious it’s been almost a year at least—”

The man he would later find out is named Sherlock goes down like a tree when Lestrade punches him.

After five months separation, he and his wife move back in together. The loneliness was just so overwhelming.

They separate again after three months because there is now a disgruntled drug addict in their living room, shouting curses at the telly and attempting to get drugs from Lestrade, who is desperately trying to get him clean.

“I just don’t understand, Greg—why would you bring him here? The man’s a junkie, for Christ’s sake! Why? Why?”

He does not say, because I miss taking care of someone, and he is like a child and needs my help.

Instead, he says, “Because he has no one else.” Neither of them does.

Sherlock is not a pleasant houseguest, as Lestrade soon finds out, but after three months of failed withdrawals and arguments, Sherlock is clean and sober. Lestrade refers to him as his “flatmate” for a while, but he doesn’t think of the man that way. He thinks of him more as a charge, as a ward, as a son. He doesn’t do anything to help the man; he does it to help himself, because he is selfish and lonely and he was once a father but isn’t anymore.

Soon after becoming clean, Sherlock moves into a dingy flat on Montague Street, but there are some nights where Lestrade will wake up to a small sound in his flat and see Sherlock pacing about in his living room. Lestrade won’t ask. He’ll only go back to sleep.

He loves the man, in his own way, because there’s a hole in his heart, or his stomach, or his soul or whatever, and Sherlock almost-fills it. He calls him “sunshine” and “lad”, once or twice, and when he’s being ornery, “a great git” and when Lestrade is around New Scotland Yard, he calls the man their “special sort of problem” and in his own mind, he says he’s a friend and, sometimes (perhaps out loud, his thoughts are overwhelming around Sherlock Holmes), he thinks he calls him “son”.

When Sherlock overdoses a few months later, alone in his shabby flat, it will not be Greg Lestrade who saves his life, but some ambiguous figure who unceremoniously deposits Sherlock at the kerb of the nearest A&E. Lestrade gets the call because who else would be Sherlock’s emergency contact?

He hates hospitals, always has, but ever since Annabel’s death, he’s taken to caring for himself when hurt or ill. He can’t stand the idea that he might die alone in the dark with only tubes and whirring machines to keep him company. God knows Juliet would not.

But he goes anyway, and he sees the drawn, pale man, intubated, with track marks months old along his arms, Lestrade knows he’s failed another child.

Ever since he’d moved back into “real life”, alone and feeble, he’d been using. Lestrade has seen him so many times since then, and yet, even with his copper’s prowess and years of experience, he’d refused to recognise the signs.

Sherlock just looks at him coolly from the hospital bed and says, “You knew this was going to happen, and you just let me go anyway. Don’t you ever get tired of abandonment?”

“Me? Abandon? Sherlock, you did this to yourself, not me. I didn’t force the needle into your vein. I offered to let you stay, with or without rent, just for you to get back on your feet, but you were the one who made the decision.”

“My God, why must you always be so thick?” He waves his hands in Lestrade’s general direction. “Do you think that you’re unique? That you’re the first to pretend you care? Do you get some sort of thrill by playing the saviour? You, and Victor, and Mycroft, and Mummy and everyone…here’s something for you to take to heart, Detective Inspector. If you want to pretend you ‘know people’—and it’s your job to ‘know people’, then remember this: everyone lies to you, and they always leave.”

He’s being cruel for the sake of being cruel, something not often seen from the man. Lestrade knows that it’s the drug talking, or the lack thereof, but there is still something incredibly unnerving about the supposed sociopath—just a boy, really, of 22 or 23—so infected with emotion and vitriol.

The detective inspector storms out without forethought (realising only hours later that he probably only confirmed what Sherlock already thought about him, about abandonment and lies), and when he returns a few days later, the nurse says that a family member has taken Sherlock Holmes to a private clinic, against doctor’s orders. No, they do not have contact information for the clinic or the relative. No, Mr Holmes did not leave any sort of message. And then there’s this one, unsaid: No, Mr Holmes will never forgive you.

Gregory Lestrade is tired of people leaving him, and tired of leaving others.

Years go by and there is not a single word from Sherlock Holmes. He’s either died from overdose or gotten himself locked up under the watchful eye of that unknown relative. Juliet has moved back in, and things are good, but they’re never going to have another child because it would be so, so painful. He misses being a father, so he keeps company with the police dogs at the Croydon base, but it’s not the same as raising a child.

Juliet is allergic to pets, so he does not ask if maybe, just maybe, a hypoallergenic one would be out of the question, because her allergy has made her hate all things that could possibly make her ill. He sometimes wonders if she’s allergic to him.

He sits in Christchurch Garden drinking coffee during his break, blessedly free from the chaos of his most recent case. He’s exhausted, but a closed case means paperwork, and paperwork means another lonely evening at New Scotland Yard, and probably a disappointed and lonely wife. It has been three years since they last reunited, and though things are tense and teeming with potential failures, he’s satisfied. Not happy. Not even content. He exists in a daze between appeased and apathetic. Placated. Tepid, like his mostly mediocre coffee.

“Your habits have varied very little since we last met, Lestrade.” A deep voice, only partially unwelcome, stirs him from not-quite reverie. He drops the coffee on the ground, luckily not on his trousers, and jumps up.

“The fuck are you doing here?” He shouts, disturbing the afternoon stroll of an elderly couple and forcing the few picnickers in the middle of the common to turn judgmentally at them. He lowers his voice. “You—where have you been?”

“Here and there.” He’s being maddeningly nonchalant, but his eyes betray him. They look sad, bored, lonely, a mixture of unmistakable emotions repressed and suppressed within his thin and careworn frame in a bespoke suit. “Stop staring. It’s rather irritating, and impolite.”

“You don’t give a shit as to what’s polite and what’s not.”

“Mm, I suppose that is true. Do you have a case for me?”

“What? A case?”

“Don’t make me repeat myself. Yes, a case. I’m very bored right now.”

“How long have you been in London?”

“About a half hour.”

“Did you just come straight here? Don’t you have any—where have you been? When were you last here? Do you know I assumed you were dead or in rehab or something? I haven’t heard from you in six goddamn years and you just wander up and ask for a case as though—”

“For God’s sake, Lestrade, it’s not as though we were friends or anything. I don’t have friends.”

This stuns Lestrade, because he had thought he and Sherlock Holmes were something like friends. The man lived in his goddamn flat, for the love of Christ; he broke up his marriage.

Instead he says: “No. I suppose we weren’t, were we?” Then asks. “So are you clean?”

“Yes. I am.”

“How long?”

“Three years now.”

“How? You couldn’t do it with me, and you couldn’t stay clean on your own.” He looks at the grimace on Sherlock's face. "Mycroft."

“Yes. My brother put me in rehab for a year and a half, where I recovered from the overdose.”

“You’ve been gone six years.”

“Yes, well, it didn’t quite live up to his expectations. After seven months, he put me in a more…rigorous rehabilitation programme in Switzerland for two years. Then he shipped me off to Provence and took away my passport so I couldn’t return to the UK.”

“What about your visa?”

“Does it matter? Do you have a case?”

“No, actually, I just finished one up. Without your help, mind you. I’m not helpless.”

“You’ve gone grey since we last spoke.”

“Yeah, I got old.”

“You can’t be more than 40.”

“Well, this job ages you more quickly than others, I suppose. Look, Sherlock, I really don’t care what you’ve been doing, but you can’t—”

“Why haven’t you been promoted?”

Lestrade is quiet for a moment. “What?”

“You rose through the ranks rather steadily earlier in your career. You should have, ceteris paribus, been promoted in a similar trajectory. Why aren’t you at least Superintendant?”

“Dunno. Plenty of guys out there are qualified.” He shifts, looking uncomfortable. “Sherlock, where are you staying? You aren’t going back to Montague Street.”

“I’ll make do.”

Lestrade doesn’t say that his spare room is open, because even with Juliet’s constant threat of separation looming over his head, Sherlock is always welcome. He hopes it’s implied.

In his mind, he has two images of Sherlock. There is the one, doped up in his flat going through withdrawal, the one who listed him as his emergency contact post-overdose, and there’s this new, improved Sherlock. He is even colder than he had been, and much more heavily guarded, and probably lonelier, too, because back then, he’d had the drugs to keep him company when he was routinely abandoned. This is a Sherlock who wears tailored suits and carries condescension and intellect with him like a shield. He does not know this Sherlock. The old Sherlock exists in a shadow that appears very rarely, very briefly. These are two different lives, so when he tells John Watson that he’s known Sherlock Holmes for five years, he does not mention the long nights begging Sherlock to get clean, and only forces himself to think of Sherlock Holmes the Newer.  

He ends up giving Sherlock access to a cold case and goes home to drink heavily. He does not get promoted, and never will, by all accounts. Sherlock will never find out about Annabel, because she is hidden away, in his coat pockets, in his wallet, close to him, in the holster where he keeps his gun and on his belt with his badge. He drinks her in his coffee and shares breakfast with her in his office, and when he’s asleep, he wakes up to the sound of “daddy, it hurts” but in his dreams, she snuggles next to him, wraps her thin, feverish arms around him and he holds her throughout the night, protecting her from illness and bacteria and monsters and in the morning, she’s gone, but she’s safe, and that’s all he’s ever wanted for her. He hopes she’s happy.

Doctor Watson is an unusual sort of man, but he’s so average upon first inspection that he becomes a sort of furniture. He’s stable and steady, and he holds up and surrounds Sherlock in a bizarre way. Lestrade has known from the very beginning that the good doctor shot Jefferson Hope from across the way at the Roland-Kerr Further Education College. But it isn’t until after Sherlock Holmes was dead that John becomes someone more than a boon companion for suffering under Sherlock Holmes’ tyranny. At first, John is someone to share a pint with after a long day, someone to go between Sherlock and the Yard when no one else is willing; someone who wears jumpers and actually knows that Lestrade’s first name is Greg.

When Sherlock takes the fall off St. Bart’s, John becomes a brother-in-arms. Together, with Sally Donovan and Doctor Hooper and sometimes dear Mrs Hudson, they talk about everything they didn’t know about the detective. They pass stories of him along like rare trading cards and covet them.

Annabel’s name never comes up during these discussions, even though Sally Donovan knows a bit about her—not from Greg, but from other, older members of the Yard. They say that Greg is not very trusting, but when he comes ‘round, he will protect you to the ends of the earth, because fathers never change (“Fathers? I thought he didn’t have any kids.” “He doesn’t, not anymore. Don’t mention Annabel to him.”).

Juliet left him for good, divorce papers and all, before Sherlock died, but gives him a comforting phone call after she hears the news.

“He was like Annabel.” He mutters through tears and a swollen tongue, half-drunk.

“What do you mean?”

“I was a father for a while again. It was nice. And I couldn’t save him.”

“It wasn’t your fault. You aren’t responsible for what happened.”

“For?”

“For Sherlock.”

She does not say that he is faultless in Annabel’s case. He knows he isn’t, but for the life of him, he can’t figure out what he could’ve done.

When John asks him to be the best man for his and Mary’s wedding, he feels something close to happiness. Still, he can’t get rid of that niggling feeling in the back of his mind, something about the way that Sherlock looked at John.

It isn’t fair, Lestrade thinks, that night, while trying to plan the stag party. I should have scared Annabel’s boyfriends shitless before they took her on dates. And now I’m here questioning the relationship of a straight man and his dead flatmate.

Even as he watches John die, grey and sallow, on a hospital bed, he can’t help but think about Annabel.

John made Sherlock happy, but not happy enough to stay alive. Sherlock made John healthy, but not healthy enough to survive as a complete human being after Sherlock died.

And this is Lestrade now. He is once many things. Once a father. Once a husband. Once a son. Once the protector. Once a friend, a saviour (just like Sherlock said he was, and Sherlock is always right). Once a hero, to someone.

For tonight, like every night before and every night after, for what seems like more than a lifetime, he will sleep fitfully, and dream of doctors and detectives and daughters and demons and deaths, so many deaths, as he has done for years, and one day, he will die too, perhaps sooner rather than later, and he doesn’t know what will come afterwards for him. He has given up his God and his promise of pearly gates and an eternity of happiness, but within him, he hopes he will be with her. So as he lays down to sleep, he knows that someday, he will have his daughter in his arms once more, just for the night before she’s ripped away from him (so fast, so sudden, so cruel). For a few tortuous hours, he will hold her, his life, his child; and they will walk along the ocean in a kingdom by the sea, just the two of them, and perhaps, just perhaps, some god or some force or some perfect coincidence will let them believe the most beautiful of lies: that they could have had this in life as well as in death, and that they could have been happy together as they are now, asleep.