Enough - Standalone (Dad 'verse)
Title: Enough
Author: Pic Akai
Rating: PG-13
Fandom: Sherlock
Word count: ~4,500
Summary: Lestrade tries to save Sherlock from himself, but it never feels like he's doing enough. (Or: Several times Lestrade had to deal with his foster son using cocaine.)
Disclaimer: I do not own any of the people, characters, situations etc in these works of fiction, except for the ones I have created. They are written for entertainment purposes and no infringement or specific comment on any person is intended.
Status: Finished.
Notes: This is part of the Dad 'verse and will make a lot more sense if you read Dad and Tangle of Anger first.
"Sherlock?"
Lestrade wasn't surprised when no answer came to his call. He banged on the door again with the side of his fist, waited a few seconds, and shouted again.
He heard a door open, and looked around to see a woman in the house next door peering out at him. When their eyes met, she slammed the door. Lestrade sighed. One day, he might stop looking like such an obvious copper.
Since shouting obviously wasn't doing anything, he decided to change tactics. The porch meant he could stand, just so, out of sight of the front window, but in hearing distance from the front door.
About three minutes elapsed before he heard, from inside, "It's fine, he's-" before the voice was abruptly muffled.
Drug users were stupid, or at least the drugs made them temporarily so. Lestrade's son wasn't stupid, and yet he was part of the same category. It wasn't the time to try to work out why. Lestrade banged on the door again.
"If you don't come out, Sherlock, I'm calling for backup and I'm raiding this place!" he shouted, loudly enough so that the neighbours would hear. He had no doubt that more people than just the woman next door were already listening.
There was a series of thumps inside before the door was wrenched open, and Lestrade came face to face with his son. It was a bittersweet reunion. On the one hand, he was still alive and relatively unharmed. On the other, he was high, hanging out in this rats' nest and glaring at Lestrade like he was moments away from strangling him. That feeling, indeed, was mutual.
"I'm socialising," Sherlock spat, while somebody stumbled out of the hallway and into the back room like Lestrade would magically disappear once they couldn't see him. "You keep telling me to socialise."
"I'm not bargaining and I'm not joking. Get in the bloody car or I will call for backup and I will bust this place."
"Is that supposed to be a threat?" Sherlock asked, contempt dripping from his words, though even as he spoke he strode past Lestrade towards the car. He left the door open and Lestrade didn't bother to shut it before following. "It's not my house."
"It's your associate," Lestrade said, deliberately not saying 'friend' because it wouldn't be true even if this wasn't to do with drugs. Sherlock didn't have friends. Lestrade wasn't sure how much of it was self-inflicted and how much was people's natural response to Sherlock being his true self; his decision often changed depending on how much of a git Sherlock was being.
Lestrade opened the car and they both got in. He didn't start the engine immediately, just locked the doors (force of habit) and leant his head forward till it rested on the steering wheel, closing his eyes and breathing out very slowly. He needed a moment to register that Sherlock was alive and okay (though he might not be once Lestrade got him home).
"You don't need to be so melodramatic," Sherlock said, interrupting before Lestrade could even get to the point where he was relaxed enough to drive safely. "I'm fine."
"Bollocks!" Lestrade shouted, lifting his head just enough so that his voice carried, and feeling viciously satisfied when he saw Sherlock start a little out of the corner of his eye. He sat up fully. "I am picking you up from a drug den, Sherlock. You are sixteen and my son and I'm picking you up from a drug den. Oh, and I'm a police detective. You are not fine, I am not fine, nothing about this situation is fine!" He hit the wheel several times to punctuate the last sentence, and stopped when he accidentally hit the horn. It sounded unnaturally loud, in a street where everyone was waiting for the police officer to leave before resuming their usual activities.
He breathed out loudly, screwing his eyes shut. He wanted to hit something but nothing was available. Besides which, he knew well enough that once the physical pain subsided there'd still be this gnawing inside, at his heart, tearing it to messier and smaller shreds with every passing tragedy.
Everything hurt these days. Mycroft moving to Scotland for a few months hurt. Sherlock dropping out of school hurt. The anniversary of Laura's death hurt like someone was setting him on fire.
Mercifully, Sherlock stayed quiet for long enough to let Lestrade gather himself into a barely useful collection of bits. He started the car and pulled away - overly carefully - because that was as much improvement in his mental state as he could hope for.
"I'm going to tell Mycroft," Lestrade said after several minutes of silence. At least all the other pain he was feeling masked the humiliation of having to ask his son, Sherlock's brother, for help to control Sherlock. Lestrade wasn't a particularly proud man, but by God using him for this made him feel like he'd failed spectacularly at being a father. Not that he hadn't already covered that failure in so many other ways, of course.
His humiliation, though, came further down the list than Sherlock's wellbeing, so here he was, threatening his son with big brother (in possibly both the literal and Orwellian senses of the term).
"Tell him what?" Sherlock asked, sounding disinterested. Lestrade glanced at him. He was staring out of the window, eyes sharp and taking in far more information than any one human had any right to. Sherlock at his most relaxed was worrying enough. Sherlock on cocaine was terrifying, if you thought about it. Lestrade tried not to think about it.
"About all of this." Lestrade waited for the traffic light to change, staring at it as though it were the key to his destiny. "Everything. I can't - I can't deal with you alone." He'd practised saying it, and the practise was nothing compared to the reality. God, he felt like shit. "You won't listen to me, you won't listen to the law. Well - maybe he can speak your language."
Sherlock actually snorted. "What on earth makes you think he doesn't know everything already?"
Lestrade began turning halfway through Sherlock's reply, and it was a good thing he had something to concentrate on, because it was probably the only thing that stopped him putting his fist through the window. "Of course I know he fucking knows!" he shouted, hating himself for swearing, but what was one more reason for self-loathing on top of the rest? It barely registered. "I'm just trying to do the - the tiniest thing I can to try and hold on to what scrap of dignity I have left, Sherlock! Can you not even let me do that?"
He checked the speedo, knowing it would not report good news, and jerked his foot off the accelerator. The car gradually slowed down to something less likely to get them noticed by one of Lestrade's colleagues.
They spent the rest of the drive in silence. It was safer. As soon as Lestrade pulled up, Sherlock leapt out of the car and let himself in, striding up the stairs to his bedroom. Lestrade stood at the bottom of the stairs for a few minutes, wanting desperately both to hug him and hit him. Instead, he eventually went to the kitchen, put the kettle on to boil and then went to get the phone. It would have been time to swallow his pride, had he any left.
* * * * *
In a normal world, Lestrade thought, people didn't celebrate their eighteenth birthdays by sneaking out of their homes, cutting off all contact with their family for four days and going on a bender.
He'd seen it coming. Sherlock had been almost physically itching for the past few weeks, as he got closer and closer to the arbitrary marker of adulthood. He left the house every day and returned every evening at the usual times, but Lestrade knew he wasn't going to university.
The problem was that Mycroft was out of the country, due to return the day after Sherlock's birthday, and there was no one else it was safe to ask for help in keeping track of him. Lestrade couldn't afford to get his colleagues involved in his personal life, certainly not when it meant his foster son and drugs. Just barely, by Mycroft's hand, had they managed to keep social services from knowing about what had been going on for the past couple of years. Lestrade was treading a bloody thin line - tightrope-walking, it felt like - but they all knew that Sherlock's placement would be at risk if 'the system' got wind of what was happening, and as shit a job as Lestrade seemed to be doing, he couldn't help but believe that Sherlock must be better off with him. He loved him, all his faults and mistakes included, and there were precious few people in this world who did.
So, without the option of allies, Lestrade simply watched as Sherlock did his own thing, didn't attend his lectures, and waited for the next big explosion.
Mycroft's flight was delayed by a day, no doubt due to a terrorist situation he'd had a hand in in some way anyway, so it wasn't until Sherlock had been gone for almost fifty hours that Mycroft's web started buzzing with the machinations needed to find him. At least, fifty hours was as long as Lestrade had known about it. A depression had settled like a lead weight into his belly on realising both that Sherlock had gone, and that he was utterly unsurprised. He'd taken just a bag of his belongings, but Lestrade knew Sherlock could survive for decades on nothing. He was a survivor, but Lestrade wanted him to thrive,and it hurt that Sherlock didn't want that too.
"Greg? We've found him." By the time Lestrade finally got the phone call he was a bag of nerves, having spent the day pacing around the house after his boss had sent him home that morning with orders to, "Sort your shit out and don't come back till you have."
Lestrade didn't think his shit would ever be fully sorted, but finding his son would be enough, for now. "Where is he?"
"I'm just on my way to collect him now. We'll-"
"No, tell me," Lestrade said. "I'll go. What's the address?"
"Really, I'm on my-"
"Please," he said, urgently. "Let me go. Let me just - at least pick him up."
There was a silence where Lestrade simultaneously felt pathetic, for being himself, and pathetically grateful for Mycroft not being a dick and rubbing it in his face.
"Of course," Mycroft said eventually, as though the awkward silence had been entirely unnecessary and therefore hadn't happened. "Do you have a pen?"
As it turned out, Lestrade hardly needed the pen. The address seemed familiar, and he worked out why as he turned onto the street, realising that he'd had occasion to visit this particular road more than once in the line of duty whilst in uniform. It housed a row of empty warehouses, surrounded by other streets with their own almost-dead businesses, and it was the perfect place for Sherlock to come and score in peace, so long as he knew how to slip under the radar on his way here.
Lestrade almost went to reach for his radio to call in, out of habit, before remembering that this was strictly off-duty business and his backup consisted of Mycroft - who was probably sitting in his car with its illegally tinted windows just around the corner, with one of his own security on foot much closer to Lestrade. Lestrade mulled over the thought, as he searched for the badly hidden entrance and shoved his way in through the gap: were Mycroft's windows illegal if his position was actually outside the law?
Experience and drug abuse training had taught Lestrade that shouting out for someone in a place like this was not a safe way to proceed, so he picked his way carefully through the space, peering into the gloom at the edges and looking for the hidden spaces where a body might be.
He found several before he came to the only one he cared about. Sherlock was lying on his back on the stone floor, his bag under his head. He looked relatively clean and tidy for someone who hadn't been home in several nights, and Lestrade suspected he'd used the showers at university, or accessed a gym.
Lestrade had stopped a few steps away once he recognised the body, but he was close enough to see Sherlock staring at him, fever-bright. A syringe lay next to him on the floor and Lestrade suspected Sherlock had heard him coming and had hit up just before he came, either because he thought it would be his last chance for a while or just as a huge 'fuck you' to Lestrade. He wasn't sure, these days.
"What are you doing," he said, without bothering to inflect for a question because he didn't expect an answer. There were things he needed to say, though, because they kept going around in his mind, kept him awake at night, and maybe voicing them would bring some momentary reprieve. "Why are you so determined to hurt me?"
He crouched down, but the position hurt, so he sat instead, knees drawn up in front of him as he stared at this boy - man, now - who was so bent on self-destruction he was willing to take down anyone else in the vicinity. "What the hell did I do to make you such a bastard?"
The reply came as a surprise. "Don't flatter yourself. I did this all by myself."
Lestrade looked at him, and he didn't look back. "I know how inept I am, Sherlock. I really don't need you to underline that for me. But I know I had some bloody hand in this, and what the hell else I should have done I can't tell."
"Nothing," Sherlock sighed. "This isn't about you. You're not - in here." Lestrade fancied he would have tapped his head for emphasis, but didn't feel like moving when so much was going on up there. "And it's not to hurt you. It's got nothing to do with you."
"Are you fucking serious?" Lestrade asked, a genuine question, but when Sherlock didn't answer he said, "I'm your dad!"
"Not as of four days ago," Sherlock said.
Lestrade had to pause to recover from that blow. It didn't look like Sherlock had meant it to hurt. He appeared to be simply stating what he saw as fact. But that could be the drugs masking his true feelings on the matter, and even if it wasn't, it did hurt. It seared.
"If you think I've stopped being your dad because you're too old to be fostered any more, you are far stupider than anyone's ever given you credit for," Lestrade said.
Sherlock frowned at the ceiling. Lestrade waited for him to work it out; to realise that people actually gave a damn about him and that therefore his actions affected them.
"Are you going to take me home?" he asked after a while.
"Yes," said Lestrade.
"I'll just come back here tomorrow," Sherlock replied.
It looked like he'd be waiting a while longer for Sherlock's epiphany.
In the meantime, he didn't reply but hauled the boy to his feet, and took him home.
* * * * *
"Forensics are gonna have a field day with this," Lestrade said, surveying the scene. His officers - a term that still slightly gave him pause - were busy trying to cordon off four streets at once, all of which surrounded a huge factory complex. It was the tail end of rush hour and raining, somewhere between drizzle and proper rain, and they were doing a grand job of bringing this particular part of London to a standstill for the time being.
"You'll be their hero," DS Freason replied, in a tone which suggested she was, perhaps, being facetious.
"Well, to be honest," Lestrade said as they made their way towards the entrance to the factory which had held their suspect, "it depends who's on forensics. Laidlaw will probably propose to me."
"Yeah, but she is not typical of her kind," said Freason.
The job was going to take hours, at least for forensics. The suspect - Lestrade felt fairly sure by now he could call him the murderer - had led them a merry chase to this place, and had been found in the company of not one but two of his victims. For one, it was too late for anything but perhaps some form of closure for his family. For the other, he had already been taken off to hospital and could now look forward to, probably, years of jumping at small noises and nightmares.
As gory as it could be, and dull during the aftermath, Lestrade was glad he worked on this particular part of the chain of saving someone's life.
This specific scene, however, was a little unusual for a murderer to pick as a base, since most tended to want to stay under the radar, at least for the actual killing part. This guy had decided instead to commit his crime in what passed for the Kings Cross of the underworld. The amount of junkies, dealers, gangsters and general law-breakers that resided within was remarkable.
Most had scarpered when they heard the sirens - if not before, when they saw the mad bloke with the knife dragging a half-conscious companion bound at the wrists with cable ties - but there were still a fair few left, mainly those who were finding it difficult to move at any speed and were now being processed both for witness statements and various offences. Unfortunately for forensics, or at least any of those who wanted to get home that night, the ones who'd managed to leg it had still, as expected, left behind their presence in the form of DNA, and processing the scene was going to take forever.
"Sir?" DC Carter called to Lestrade half an hour later, as he was logging some details he'd overheard from a particularly loud-mouthed alcoholic. Lestrade looked up questioningly, but Carter didn't speak until he was right at Lestrade's ear. "There's a bloke in here says he knows you, but not to make it obvious, just to get you."
Lestrade raised an eyebrow at Carter, who looked simultaneously confused and spooked. "There's plenty of blokes in there who know me, it's crawling with the Met," Lestrade replied.
Carter shook his head. "One of the...junkies, I suppose."
"You suppose?" Lestrade repeated, sounding deliberately sceptical even as a nasty thought entered his mind and wiggled its way down into his stomach. "What does he-" He stopped himself, realising that appearances could be deceptive. "Show me."
Carter led him to a factory they'd only just begun interviewing in, right to the back, behind a pile of old machine parts that looked too tightly packed together to be able to accommodate an adult human. "He's in there," Carter said, and walked away sharpish. It wasn't a good sign.
"Hello?" Lestrade called, one hand on his radio just in case his hunch was wrong.
"Lestrade," came the reply, along with a curly-haired head, and Lestrade's stomach dropped along with his hand. "Get me out of here, would you?"
For a moment Lestrade thought he meant the pile of machine parts, but then Sherlock wriggled his way out and he realised that he meant the less savoury option. "Why should I?" he asked. "I'm at fucking work, Sherlock. You haven't spoken to me in three months and now you want my help to get out of being bloody arrested?"
"Yes," Sherlock said, standing straight, and looking at Lestrade with that gleam in his eyes that Lestrade hated, wished he could snuff right out, if only it wouldn't snuff the rest of Sherlock out too. There was a pause, and then Sherlock said, "Yes please."
"Great. We've managed to reach the stage of the manners you should have had in place from age four. Not good enough." This was messing with Lestrade's head; it was his crime scene and here he was facing his drug-addict son as one of the petty criminals. "Why should I bother?"
It had got easier, as Sherlock had got older, to blame Sherlock slightly more and himself slightly less. Lestrade still held a whole metric ton of shame and guilt, but with Sherlock an adult - and Mycroft still unable, with all his resources and his family connection, to entirely corral Sherlock - believing that this wasn't just Lestrade's terrible parenting was possible. Sherlock was making choices, as an adult, completely without Lestrade in mind (he knew that much) and they were the wrong ones. It still meant Lestrade obviously hadn't put the right foundations in place for making good ones, but adults could choose to follow the path that was laid for them, or they could choose to forge a new one. Laura had, what with her PhD hardly on level footing with her mother's alcoholism and her father's multiple convictions for both fraud and domestic violence.
"Because you love me," or, "Because I'm your son," would have been the easy answers to Lestrade's question, and ones which most people would have jumped on. But they were hard truths for Sherlock, who liked to consider himself not merely an island but a fortress encased in concrete, and Lestrade was not going to help him here to fortify his innumerable defences. He watched as Sherlock frowned and tried to formulate a response that would satisfy them both.
"Because Mycroft will only make the charges go away later anyway, and this way you'll save wasting police resources in processing me."
"I wish you'd use that brain for something bloody useful rather than finding new ways to make me feel stupid," Lestrade said. Sherlock's facial muscles twitched almost imperceptibly. Lestrade hoped he was trying to suppress his guilt, but assumed he was more likely suppressing amusement. It was that thought which made him add, "Well, even if he does get you out later it doesn't mean he can stop what happens before then."
Sherlock looked warily at him. "Is that meant to be a threat?"
Lestrade both wanted him to think it was, and wanted him never to countenance the idea that Lestrade could threaten him.
"Come on," he sighed, and led Sherlock out of the factory and away under the tape. He watched him go, wanting to call so many things after him, but knowing they would all fall on deaf ears.
* * * * *
Lestrade sped through the heart of the city, keeping two things on his mind as he did: one, don't crash, and two, don't die. That last was a thought he projected at Sherlock, as though doing so would make any damn difference whether Sherlock heard it or not. Knowing Sherlock, he'd probably die just to be contrary.
Lestrade knew Mycroft was travelling at the same speed from the other side of the city, though he was probably getting a lot more information at the same time since he didn't have to concentrate on driving himself. Lestrade flipped the siren on to navigate a particularly ugly junction, then turned it off again. He would have liked to keep it going all the way there, letting him scream his own distress masked by its wail.
He didn't mess about with a parking ticket, would sort it later, and barely locked the car as he ran for the entrance to A&E. "I'm looking for Sherlock Holmes," he said to the receptionist, brandishing his warrant card like it was a magic pass to get him there immediately.
"Sorry?" the receptionist said, looking bemused, but her colleague had overheard and turned around from her task long enough to say, "Cubicle four. Are you-"
Lestrade shook his head. "Family. But my lot might get here soon anyway, I don't know..." He hadn't been told anything other than that Sherlock was at St Thomas' due to an overdose. Mycroft hadn't had any more information at that point, and knew better than to phone and tell Lestrade anything else while he was driving.
Lestrade was let through the doors, and then he strode past the other cubicles to get to four. The curtain was half-open; he threw it back before he could let himself think and then stood, breathing heavily, staring in complete relief at Sherlock lying half propped-up in bed, eyes open, hand reaching out for a glass on the side cabinet. Alive.
"You little shit," he muttered as he took the two steps towards his boy, looking as he moved for any tubes or other medical equipment so that when he got there he was able to reach out and grab him, draw Sherlock tight into his chest and hold him there, ignoring Sherlock's faint protest.
"You absolute and total bloody wanker of a bastard," he said, still holding Sherlock, who had by now stopped protesting and was simply letting himself be held. Lestrade felt tears come to his eyes and took two deep breaths, willing them away; they wouldn't help right now. "I hate that you did this to us."
He finally let go, glancing at Mycroft, who looked entirely out of place in the vinyl-covered hospital chair in his three piece suit. To add to it, he looked bloody calm, but Lestrade knew how fast he'd got here, what he'd sounded like on the phone, and how good he was at faking anything. He wondered what had passed between the brothers before he got there, and whether anything that was said today might finally get through to Sherlock.
He reached out and put a hand on Mycroft's shoulder, anchoring them together, and he fancied he felt Mycroft lean in a little, though anyone else wouldn't have seen anything but a man simply allowing the touch to comfort another.
Lestrade was turning to look back at Sherlock, slightly more grounded, mouth open to speak, when the wind was knocked from his sails yet again.
"I'm sorry, dad."
He blinked, staring unseeingly at Sherlock, who was looking at the bed sheet rather than him.
"What?" he said, sounding stupid even to his own ears.
"I'm sorry," said Sherlock again, quieter this time.
There were so many things Lestrade could have said to him there, so many things that were raging inside his head and his heart. Instead, he pulled Sherlock toward him again, and this time Sherlock wrapped his arms, very loosely, around Lestrade in return.
Lestrade wasn't stupid enough to think it was a magical moment and Sherlock would be all better from now on. But they were one step closer to it being a possibility.
Sometimes, that had to be enough.
Pic
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Author: Pic Akai
Rating: PG-13
Fandom: Sherlock
Word count: ~4,500
Summary: Lestrade tries to save Sherlock from himself, but it never feels like he's doing enough. (Or: Several times Lestrade had to deal with his foster son using cocaine.)
Disclaimer: I do not own any of the people, characters, situations etc in these works of fiction, except for the ones I have created. They are written for entertainment purposes and no infringement or specific comment on any person is intended.
Status: Finished.
Notes: This is part of the Dad 'verse and will make a lot more sense if you read Dad and Tangle of Anger first.
"Sherlock?"
Lestrade wasn't surprised when no answer came to his call. He banged on the door again with the side of his fist, waited a few seconds, and shouted again.
He heard a door open, and looked around to see a woman in the house next door peering out at him. When their eyes met, she slammed the door. Lestrade sighed. One day, he might stop looking like such an obvious copper.
Since shouting obviously wasn't doing anything, he decided to change tactics. The porch meant he could stand, just so, out of sight of the front window, but in hearing distance from the front door.
About three minutes elapsed before he heard, from inside, "It's fine, he's-" before the voice was abruptly muffled.
Drug users were stupid, or at least the drugs made them temporarily so. Lestrade's son wasn't stupid, and yet he was part of the same category. It wasn't the time to try to work out why. Lestrade banged on the door again.
"If you don't come out, Sherlock, I'm calling for backup and I'm raiding this place!" he shouted, loudly enough so that the neighbours would hear. He had no doubt that more people than just the woman next door were already listening.
There was a series of thumps inside before the door was wrenched open, and Lestrade came face to face with his son. It was a bittersweet reunion. On the one hand, he was still alive and relatively unharmed. On the other, he was high, hanging out in this rats' nest and glaring at Lestrade like he was moments away from strangling him. That feeling, indeed, was mutual.
"I'm socialising," Sherlock spat, while somebody stumbled out of the hallway and into the back room like Lestrade would magically disappear once they couldn't see him. "You keep telling me to socialise."
"I'm not bargaining and I'm not joking. Get in the bloody car or I will call for backup and I will bust this place."
"Is that supposed to be a threat?" Sherlock asked, contempt dripping from his words, though even as he spoke he strode past Lestrade towards the car. He left the door open and Lestrade didn't bother to shut it before following. "It's not my house."
"It's your associate," Lestrade said, deliberately not saying 'friend' because it wouldn't be true even if this wasn't to do with drugs. Sherlock didn't have friends. Lestrade wasn't sure how much of it was self-inflicted and how much was people's natural response to Sherlock being his true self; his decision often changed depending on how much of a git Sherlock was being.
Lestrade opened the car and they both got in. He didn't start the engine immediately, just locked the doors (force of habit) and leant his head forward till it rested on the steering wheel, closing his eyes and breathing out very slowly. He needed a moment to register that Sherlock was alive and okay (though he might not be once Lestrade got him home).
"You don't need to be so melodramatic," Sherlock said, interrupting before Lestrade could even get to the point where he was relaxed enough to drive safely. "I'm fine."
"Bollocks!" Lestrade shouted, lifting his head just enough so that his voice carried, and feeling viciously satisfied when he saw Sherlock start a little out of the corner of his eye. He sat up fully. "I am picking you up from a drug den, Sherlock. You are sixteen and my son and I'm picking you up from a drug den. Oh, and I'm a police detective. You are not fine, I am not fine, nothing about this situation is fine!" He hit the wheel several times to punctuate the last sentence, and stopped when he accidentally hit the horn. It sounded unnaturally loud, in a street where everyone was waiting for the police officer to leave before resuming their usual activities.
He breathed out loudly, screwing his eyes shut. He wanted to hit something but nothing was available. Besides which, he knew well enough that once the physical pain subsided there'd still be this gnawing inside, at his heart, tearing it to messier and smaller shreds with every passing tragedy.
Everything hurt these days. Mycroft moving to Scotland for a few months hurt. Sherlock dropping out of school hurt. The anniversary of Laura's death hurt like someone was setting him on fire.
Mercifully, Sherlock stayed quiet for long enough to let Lestrade gather himself into a barely useful collection of bits. He started the car and pulled away - overly carefully - because that was as much improvement in his mental state as he could hope for.
"I'm going to tell Mycroft," Lestrade said after several minutes of silence. At least all the other pain he was feeling masked the humiliation of having to ask his son, Sherlock's brother, for help to control Sherlock. Lestrade wasn't a particularly proud man, but by God using him for this made him feel like he'd failed spectacularly at being a father. Not that he hadn't already covered that failure in so many other ways, of course.
His humiliation, though, came further down the list than Sherlock's wellbeing, so here he was, threatening his son with big brother (in possibly both the literal and Orwellian senses of the term).
"Tell him what?" Sherlock asked, sounding disinterested. Lestrade glanced at him. He was staring out of the window, eyes sharp and taking in far more information than any one human had any right to. Sherlock at his most relaxed was worrying enough. Sherlock on cocaine was terrifying, if you thought about it. Lestrade tried not to think about it.
"About all of this." Lestrade waited for the traffic light to change, staring at it as though it were the key to his destiny. "Everything. I can't - I can't deal with you alone." He'd practised saying it, and the practise was nothing compared to the reality. God, he felt like shit. "You won't listen to me, you won't listen to the law. Well - maybe he can speak your language."
Sherlock actually snorted. "What on earth makes you think he doesn't know everything already?"
Lestrade began turning halfway through Sherlock's reply, and it was a good thing he had something to concentrate on, because it was probably the only thing that stopped him putting his fist through the window. "Of course I know he fucking knows!" he shouted, hating himself for swearing, but what was one more reason for self-loathing on top of the rest? It barely registered. "I'm just trying to do the - the tiniest thing I can to try and hold on to what scrap of dignity I have left, Sherlock! Can you not even let me do that?"
He checked the speedo, knowing it would not report good news, and jerked his foot off the accelerator. The car gradually slowed down to something less likely to get them noticed by one of Lestrade's colleagues.
They spent the rest of the drive in silence. It was safer. As soon as Lestrade pulled up, Sherlock leapt out of the car and let himself in, striding up the stairs to his bedroom. Lestrade stood at the bottom of the stairs for a few minutes, wanting desperately both to hug him and hit him. Instead, he eventually went to the kitchen, put the kettle on to boil and then went to get the phone. It would have been time to swallow his pride, had he any left.
* * * * *
In a normal world, Lestrade thought, people didn't celebrate their eighteenth birthdays by sneaking out of their homes, cutting off all contact with their family for four days and going on a bender.
He'd seen it coming. Sherlock had been almost physically itching for the past few weeks, as he got closer and closer to the arbitrary marker of adulthood. He left the house every day and returned every evening at the usual times, but Lestrade knew he wasn't going to university.
The problem was that Mycroft was out of the country, due to return the day after Sherlock's birthday, and there was no one else it was safe to ask for help in keeping track of him. Lestrade couldn't afford to get his colleagues involved in his personal life, certainly not when it meant his foster son and drugs. Just barely, by Mycroft's hand, had they managed to keep social services from knowing about what had been going on for the past couple of years. Lestrade was treading a bloody thin line - tightrope-walking, it felt like - but they all knew that Sherlock's placement would be at risk if 'the system' got wind of what was happening, and as shit a job as Lestrade seemed to be doing, he couldn't help but believe that Sherlock must be better off with him. He loved him, all his faults and mistakes included, and there were precious few people in this world who did.
So, without the option of allies, Lestrade simply watched as Sherlock did his own thing, didn't attend his lectures, and waited for the next big explosion.
Mycroft's flight was delayed by a day, no doubt due to a terrorist situation he'd had a hand in in some way anyway, so it wasn't until Sherlock had been gone for almost fifty hours that Mycroft's web started buzzing with the machinations needed to find him. At least, fifty hours was as long as Lestrade had known about it. A depression had settled like a lead weight into his belly on realising both that Sherlock had gone, and that he was utterly unsurprised. He'd taken just a bag of his belongings, but Lestrade knew Sherlock could survive for decades on nothing. He was a survivor, but Lestrade wanted him to thrive,and it hurt that Sherlock didn't want that too.
"Greg? We've found him." By the time Lestrade finally got the phone call he was a bag of nerves, having spent the day pacing around the house after his boss had sent him home that morning with orders to, "Sort your shit out and don't come back till you have."
Lestrade didn't think his shit would ever be fully sorted, but finding his son would be enough, for now. "Where is he?"
"I'm just on my way to collect him now. We'll-"
"No, tell me," Lestrade said. "I'll go. What's the address?"
"Really, I'm on my-"
"Please," he said, urgently. "Let me go. Let me just - at least pick him up."
There was a silence where Lestrade simultaneously felt pathetic, for being himself, and pathetically grateful for Mycroft not being a dick and rubbing it in his face.
"Of course," Mycroft said eventually, as though the awkward silence had been entirely unnecessary and therefore hadn't happened. "Do you have a pen?"
As it turned out, Lestrade hardly needed the pen. The address seemed familiar, and he worked out why as he turned onto the street, realising that he'd had occasion to visit this particular road more than once in the line of duty whilst in uniform. It housed a row of empty warehouses, surrounded by other streets with their own almost-dead businesses, and it was the perfect place for Sherlock to come and score in peace, so long as he knew how to slip under the radar on his way here.
Lestrade almost went to reach for his radio to call in, out of habit, before remembering that this was strictly off-duty business and his backup consisted of Mycroft - who was probably sitting in his car with its illegally tinted windows just around the corner, with one of his own security on foot much closer to Lestrade. Lestrade mulled over the thought, as he searched for the badly hidden entrance and shoved his way in through the gap: were Mycroft's windows illegal if his position was actually outside the law?
Experience and drug abuse training had taught Lestrade that shouting out for someone in a place like this was not a safe way to proceed, so he picked his way carefully through the space, peering into the gloom at the edges and looking for the hidden spaces where a body might be.
He found several before he came to the only one he cared about. Sherlock was lying on his back on the stone floor, his bag under his head. He looked relatively clean and tidy for someone who hadn't been home in several nights, and Lestrade suspected he'd used the showers at university, or accessed a gym.
Lestrade had stopped a few steps away once he recognised the body, but he was close enough to see Sherlock staring at him, fever-bright. A syringe lay next to him on the floor and Lestrade suspected Sherlock had heard him coming and had hit up just before he came, either because he thought it would be his last chance for a while or just as a huge 'fuck you' to Lestrade. He wasn't sure, these days.
"What are you doing," he said, without bothering to inflect for a question because he didn't expect an answer. There were things he needed to say, though, because they kept going around in his mind, kept him awake at night, and maybe voicing them would bring some momentary reprieve. "Why are you so determined to hurt me?"
He crouched down, but the position hurt, so he sat instead, knees drawn up in front of him as he stared at this boy - man, now - who was so bent on self-destruction he was willing to take down anyone else in the vicinity. "What the hell did I do to make you such a bastard?"
The reply came as a surprise. "Don't flatter yourself. I did this all by myself."
Lestrade looked at him, and he didn't look back. "I know how inept I am, Sherlock. I really don't need you to underline that for me. But I know I had some bloody hand in this, and what the hell else I should have done I can't tell."
"Nothing," Sherlock sighed. "This isn't about you. You're not - in here." Lestrade fancied he would have tapped his head for emphasis, but didn't feel like moving when so much was going on up there. "And it's not to hurt you. It's got nothing to do with you."
"Are you fucking serious?" Lestrade asked, a genuine question, but when Sherlock didn't answer he said, "I'm your dad!"
"Not as of four days ago," Sherlock said.
Lestrade had to pause to recover from that blow. It didn't look like Sherlock had meant it to hurt. He appeared to be simply stating what he saw as fact. But that could be the drugs masking his true feelings on the matter, and even if it wasn't, it did hurt. It seared.
"If you think I've stopped being your dad because you're too old to be fostered any more, you are far stupider than anyone's ever given you credit for," Lestrade said.
Sherlock frowned at the ceiling. Lestrade waited for him to work it out; to realise that people actually gave a damn about him and that therefore his actions affected them.
"Are you going to take me home?" he asked after a while.
"Yes," said Lestrade.
"I'll just come back here tomorrow," Sherlock replied.
It looked like he'd be waiting a while longer for Sherlock's epiphany.
In the meantime, he didn't reply but hauled the boy to his feet, and took him home.
* * * * *
"Forensics are gonna have a field day with this," Lestrade said, surveying the scene. His officers - a term that still slightly gave him pause - were busy trying to cordon off four streets at once, all of which surrounded a huge factory complex. It was the tail end of rush hour and raining, somewhere between drizzle and proper rain, and they were doing a grand job of bringing this particular part of London to a standstill for the time being.
"You'll be their hero," DS Freason replied, in a tone which suggested she was, perhaps, being facetious.
"Well, to be honest," Lestrade said as they made their way towards the entrance to the factory which had held their suspect, "it depends who's on forensics. Laidlaw will probably propose to me."
"Yeah, but she is not typical of her kind," said Freason.
The job was going to take hours, at least for forensics. The suspect - Lestrade felt fairly sure by now he could call him the murderer - had led them a merry chase to this place, and had been found in the company of not one but two of his victims. For one, it was too late for anything but perhaps some form of closure for his family. For the other, he had already been taken off to hospital and could now look forward to, probably, years of jumping at small noises and nightmares.
As gory as it could be, and dull during the aftermath, Lestrade was glad he worked on this particular part of the chain of saving someone's life.
This specific scene, however, was a little unusual for a murderer to pick as a base, since most tended to want to stay under the radar, at least for the actual killing part. This guy had decided instead to commit his crime in what passed for the Kings Cross of the underworld. The amount of junkies, dealers, gangsters and general law-breakers that resided within was remarkable.
Most had scarpered when they heard the sirens - if not before, when they saw the mad bloke with the knife dragging a half-conscious companion bound at the wrists with cable ties - but there were still a fair few left, mainly those who were finding it difficult to move at any speed and were now being processed both for witness statements and various offences. Unfortunately for forensics, or at least any of those who wanted to get home that night, the ones who'd managed to leg it had still, as expected, left behind their presence in the form of DNA, and processing the scene was going to take forever.
"Sir?" DC Carter called to Lestrade half an hour later, as he was logging some details he'd overheard from a particularly loud-mouthed alcoholic. Lestrade looked up questioningly, but Carter didn't speak until he was right at Lestrade's ear. "There's a bloke in here says he knows you, but not to make it obvious, just to get you."
Lestrade raised an eyebrow at Carter, who looked simultaneously confused and spooked. "There's plenty of blokes in there who know me, it's crawling with the Met," Lestrade replied.
Carter shook his head. "One of the...junkies, I suppose."
"You suppose?" Lestrade repeated, sounding deliberately sceptical even as a nasty thought entered his mind and wiggled its way down into his stomach. "What does he-" He stopped himself, realising that appearances could be deceptive. "Show me."
Carter led him to a factory they'd only just begun interviewing in, right to the back, behind a pile of old machine parts that looked too tightly packed together to be able to accommodate an adult human. "He's in there," Carter said, and walked away sharpish. It wasn't a good sign.
"Hello?" Lestrade called, one hand on his radio just in case his hunch was wrong.
"Lestrade," came the reply, along with a curly-haired head, and Lestrade's stomach dropped along with his hand. "Get me out of here, would you?"
For a moment Lestrade thought he meant the pile of machine parts, but then Sherlock wriggled his way out and he realised that he meant the less savoury option. "Why should I?" he asked. "I'm at fucking work, Sherlock. You haven't spoken to me in three months and now you want my help to get out of being bloody arrested?"
"Yes," Sherlock said, standing straight, and looking at Lestrade with that gleam in his eyes that Lestrade hated, wished he could snuff right out, if only it wouldn't snuff the rest of Sherlock out too. There was a pause, and then Sherlock said, "Yes please."
"Great. We've managed to reach the stage of the manners you should have had in place from age four. Not good enough." This was messing with Lestrade's head; it was his crime scene and here he was facing his drug-addict son as one of the petty criminals. "Why should I bother?"
It had got easier, as Sherlock had got older, to blame Sherlock slightly more and himself slightly less. Lestrade still held a whole metric ton of shame and guilt, but with Sherlock an adult - and Mycroft still unable, with all his resources and his family connection, to entirely corral Sherlock - believing that this wasn't just Lestrade's terrible parenting was possible. Sherlock was making choices, as an adult, completely without Lestrade in mind (he knew that much) and they were the wrong ones. It still meant Lestrade obviously hadn't put the right foundations in place for making good ones, but adults could choose to follow the path that was laid for them, or they could choose to forge a new one. Laura had, what with her PhD hardly on level footing with her mother's alcoholism and her father's multiple convictions for both fraud and domestic violence.
"Because you love me," or, "Because I'm your son," would have been the easy answers to Lestrade's question, and ones which most people would have jumped on. But they were hard truths for Sherlock, who liked to consider himself not merely an island but a fortress encased in concrete, and Lestrade was not going to help him here to fortify his innumerable defences. He watched as Sherlock frowned and tried to formulate a response that would satisfy them both.
"Because Mycroft will only make the charges go away later anyway, and this way you'll save wasting police resources in processing me."
"I wish you'd use that brain for something bloody useful rather than finding new ways to make me feel stupid," Lestrade said. Sherlock's facial muscles twitched almost imperceptibly. Lestrade hoped he was trying to suppress his guilt, but assumed he was more likely suppressing amusement. It was that thought which made him add, "Well, even if he does get you out later it doesn't mean he can stop what happens before then."
Sherlock looked warily at him. "Is that meant to be a threat?"
Lestrade both wanted him to think it was, and wanted him never to countenance the idea that Lestrade could threaten him.
"Come on," he sighed, and led Sherlock out of the factory and away under the tape. He watched him go, wanting to call so many things after him, but knowing they would all fall on deaf ears.
* * * * *
Lestrade sped through the heart of the city, keeping two things on his mind as he did: one, don't crash, and two, don't die. That last was a thought he projected at Sherlock, as though doing so would make any damn difference whether Sherlock heard it or not. Knowing Sherlock, he'd probably die just to be contrary.
Lestrade knew Mycroft was travelling at the same speed from the other side of the city, though he was probably getting a lot more information at the same time since he didn't have to concentrate on driving himself. Lestrade flipped the siren on to navigate a particularly ugly junction, then turned it off again. He would have liked to keep it going all the way there, letting him scream his own distress masked by its wail.
He didn't mess about with a parking ticket, would sort it later, and barely locked the car as he ran for the entrance to A&E. "I'm looking for Sherlock Holmes," he said to the receptionist, brandishing his warrant card like it was a magic pass to get him there immediately.
"Sorry?" the receptionist said, looking bemused, but her colleague had overheard and turned around from her task long enough to say, "Cubicle four. Are you-"
Lestrade shook his head. "Family. But my lot might get here soon anyway, I don't know..." He hadn't been told anything other than that Sherlock was at St Thomas' due to an overdose. Mycroft hadn't had any more information at that point, and knew better than to phone and tell Lestrade anything else while he was driving.
Lestrade was let through the doors, and then he strode past the other cubicles to get to four. The curtain was half-open; he threw it back before he could let himself think and then stood, breathing heavily, staring in complete relief at Sherlock lying half propped-up in bed, eyes open, hand reaching out for a glass on the side cabinet. Alive.
"You little shit," he muttered as he took the two steps towards his boy, looking as he moved for any tubes or other medical equipment so that when he got there he was able to reach out and grab him, draw Sherlock tight into his chest and hold him there, ignoring Sherlock's faint protest.
"You absolute and total bloody wanker of a bastard," he said, still holding Sherlock, who had by now stopped protesting and was simply letting himself be held. Lestrade felt tears come to his eyes and took two deep breaths, willing them away; they wouldn't help right now. "I hate that you did this to us."
He finally let go, glancing at Mycroft, who looked entirely out of place in the vinyl-covered hospital chair in his three piece suit. To add to it, he looked bloody calm, but Lestrade knew how fast he'd got here, what he'd sounded like on the phone, and how good he was at faking anything. He wondered what had passed between the brothers before he got there, and whether anything that was said today might finally get through to Sherlock.
He reached out and put a hand on Mycroft's shoulder, anchoring them together, and he fancied he felt Mycroft lean in a little, though anyone else wouldn't have seen anything but a man simply allowing the touch to comfort another.
Lestrade was turning to look back at Sherlock, slightly more grounded, mouth open to speak, when the wind was knocked from his sails yet again.
"I'm sorry, dad."
He blinked, staring unseeingly at Sherlock, who was looking at the bed sheet rather than him.
"What?" he said, sounding stupid even to his own ears.
"I'm sorry," said Sherlock again, quieter this time.
There were so many things Lestrade could have said to him there, so many things that were raging inside his head and his heart. Instead, he pulled Sherlock toward him again, and this time Sherlock wrapped his arms, very loosely, around Lestrade in return.
Lestrade wasn't stupid enough to think it was a magical moment and Sherlock would be all better from now on. But they were one step closer to it being a possibility.
Sometimes, that had to be enough.
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