Fic: Nor The Years Condemn (2/6)
Title: Nor The Years Condemn (2/6)
Characters: Sherlock Holmes, DI Lestrade, Ensemble
Pairing: Lestrade/OCs (mentioned); Lestrade/Sherlock
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: I don’t own them
Word Count: c. 6,500 (this part); c. 35,000 total
Warnings: Language; Age Discrepancy; Mild Sexuality; Drug Use
Spoilers: None
Betas: sidneysussex, gentlest_sin, archea2
Summary: Greg Lestrade is forty-three when he saves the life of a brilliant drug-addict. Two years later, he's starting to realize there are some certainties to his life now that Sherlock Holmes is part of it. He's going gray quickly, for one thing. He starts finding experiments in his kitchen. And he may even be, inexplicably, beginning to care for the detective. A series of vignettes that cover the five years leading up to “A Study In Pink.”
Prologue (with full Author’s Notes)
Part One
Notes for Part Two: Well, apparently all my Lestrades are destined to be astronomy nerds. You have been warned.
-----
Lestrade has had a key for Montague Street almost from the start, mostly because it saved him from having to break down the door every time that he needed Sherlock’s assistance and partially because he occasionally needed to keep Sherlock from doing lasting damage to himself. Sherlock’s never needed a key for Lestrade’s place - no matter how many times Lestrade has changed the locks, the detective still manages to find a way in. Just because he’s never needed one, however, doesn’t mean he shouldn’t have one, and Lestrade mulls this over for a few weeks before coming to the inevitable decision.
“I’d very much appreciate if you stopped antagonizing my team,” Lestrade is telling him one night as they consume a late dinner - or early breakfast, depending on how one wanted to look at it - in his office.
“And I’d very much appreciate if they stopped being idiots. It doesn’t look like either is going to happen in the near future - or without divine intervention - so I suggest you drop it,” Sherlock tells him. “Are you going to eat that?”
Lestrade stifles a snort and pushes over his abandoned container of food. Sherlock is like that - he never eats while on a case, but in between he’ll consume anything and everything put in front of him. Lestrade has gotten into the habit of leaving food out around his flat - bagel in the bathroom, soup in the kitchen, juice by the sofa - and Sherlock will put everything away without even noticing that he’s doing it. The man’s metabolism - and appetite - is staggering.
Something pokes him in the leg as he leans over to pass his food, and with a soft, “Oh! Right,” he digs a key chain out of his pocket.
“Here,” he says, tossing it at Sherlock. The detective catches it deftly in his left hand without interrupting his eating. “I’ve been meaning to give that to you. Thought it might come in handy.”
“Key to your flat,” Sherlock murmurs to himself, turning it over in his hand once before pocketing it. “Right. Might do, at that.”
And it does, because it’s not long after that (days, at most) when Lestrade wakes to a familiar creak and thud - the door to his flat opening and closing. He twists his head to look at the unforgiving numbers on his clock - 3:12 - and lays there for a moment, listening. He hears a sound a bit like shuffling feet and sighs because he recognizes the tread. It takes a moment for him to persuade his limbs to move, and then he clambers unsteadily out of bed, snatching up his dressing gown on his way out the door.
“Can’t sleep?” he asks the figure who has invaded his living room. He tightens the dressing gown around his pajamas and folds his arms, leaning against the door frame.
“It’s a wonder, Lestrade,” Sherlock says dully from where he has thrown himself on the sofa, “that you haven’t advanced higher at the Yard. Your deductive skills are truly astounding.”
“A simple yes would do just fine, wanker,” Lestrade says. “What do you care about sleep, anyway? I thought it got in the way of the work. Everything else being transport and all.”
“Sadly,” Sherlock says with disdain, “even the most perfect of machines requires maintenance now and again. Usually I am able to ignore it, but that only works for so long.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t ignore it, then,” Lestrade tells him, striding over to the sofa. “Come on; budge up.”
“There’s no room -”
“There would be if you lifted your legs,” he points out, and that’s logic even Sherlock can’t argue with.
Sherlock heaves a sigh and hauls himself into a sitting position, preparing to swing his legs onto the floor. Lestrade is, for once, too quick, and he slides onto the cushion where Sherlock’s back had just been pressed, snaking an arm around the younger man and tugging him close. Sherlock falls back against his chest with an indignant sound of protest, but Lestrade mutters, “Relax, sunshine. Only trying to help.”
“How is this helping?”
“Helps not to be alone, sometimes.” Lestrade scoots down so he is fully relaxed against the back of the sofa, legs outstretched before him. Sherlock’s head is now tucked just underneath his chin. “Comfortable?”
There is a slight pause before Sherlock answers, “Yes,” and to Lestrade’s ears the voice is hesitant, as though he’s surprised himself with his answer.
“Good,” he whispers, rubbing Sherlock’s upper arm with his free hand. “That’s good. I suppose it’s a waste of breath to ask what it was about?”
“And yet you wasted the breath anyway.” But Sherlock shifts and settles fully against him, so Lestrade counts that as a small victory and thinks that it wasn’t wasted, after all. He keeps his hand on the man’s arm, gently rubbing, and after several long moments of this he feels the tension begin to ease from the taut shoulders.
The detective drops into a doze not long after, and stays that way through the final hours of Lestrade’s night and his usual morning routine. He tosses a blanket over Sherlock before leaving for the Yard, and when he returns that evening the door has been locked and the blanket neatly folded and put away - all signs of Sherlock’s presence erased.
----
He goes gray at the temples first.
It isn’t something he notices until well after the hair around his ears has started to fade, and he touches it with dismay the morning it finally becomes apparent to him. He had hoped - well, his hair did hang onto its color for years longer than it should have. He’s well into his forties now - at least he’s had it this long.
It doesn’t stop him from shutting off the bathroom light and continuing his morning routine in semi-darkness.
----
Lestrade stumbles up the stairs to his flat one crisp autumn night, Sherlock in tow. They’ve come straight from a crime scene, and Lestrade knows it will be a couple of hours before he’s needed again. He’s brought Sherlock along with the intention of forcibly feeding him whatever he has in the fridge, and perhaps shoving a pot of coffee at him in the process. He’d danced around the crime scene with pupils gone unnaturally wide and there was a thin, high-strung quality to his gait. Lestrade can’t be certain of it, not tonight, but he has his suspicions about what Sherlock’s been getting up to lately in his free time.
But the first thing he does is make for the bathroom once they’re inside his flat, because there’s blood clinging to his hands that doesn’t belong to him and right now all he wants to do is crawl out of his skin. He doesn’t even bother taking the time to close his front door, and so Sherlock does it for him.
“I need to speak to the mother,” the detective tells him, following him into the bathroom and casually leaning against the open door while Lestrade runs the water - hot, too hot, enough to make him want to recoil from the contact - and begins methodically scrubbing the blood and grime from his fingers.
“We’ve already taken her statement,” Lestrade tells him tightly.
“You forget that I was there, Lestrade. And she lied to you, in case you care to know.”
“You can’t possibly know that.”
“Are you honestly this stupid?” Sherlock snaps. “She maintained eye contact, which indicates she was trying to appear sincere. When humans are remembering, they generally let their gaze fall on immobile objects in order to focus and remember. She also kept looking to your left - an indication that she was inventing details. She would have looked to your right if she was attempting to remember something.”
“Right, well, I’ll take it into consideration, but that’s hardly evidence.” Lestrade grabs a towel and rubs his hands raw, sitting down heavily on the closed lid of the toilet. He’s torn between wanting Sherlock to stay and wishing he would leave, because the man’s outrageous lack of compassion is grating on his already thin nerves but at the same time, should he be left alone he knows all he will be able to think about is that room.
And that child.
“All I need is to -”
“Dammit, Sherlock!” Lestrade drops his head into his hands, pressing his palms to his eyes. Lines of gold are scorched into his eyelids from the lamp, and the surrounding darkness does nothing to blot out the pictures still surfacing in his mind. “Enough.”
“Oh, what now?” Sherlock says in exasperation. “It’s been hours, Lestrade. Surely you aren’t still upset.”
“Hours?” Lestrade says with a huff. “It doesn’t go away in a few hours, Sherlock. It doesn’t even really ever go away at all. A child died tonight - do you even care about that?”
“Caring won’t bring her back,” Sherlock says dismissively, waving a hand at him, “so you may as well stop now. You’re little good to me like this. Pull yourself together, or leave.”
“Sherlock -”
“What good will it do?” Sherlock says suddenly, rounding on him, and Lestrade is hit with the full, unfiltered blast of his intensity. He’s interrupted Sherlock in the middle of a deduction, cut him off, and now that unfocused energy hits him like a blast. “People die, Lestrade, and you of anyone should realize that. Caring about it is what has held you back, and I see no reason to make the same mistake. Besides, why care about a dead child when her murderer is being infinitely more interesting?”
Lestrade resists the impulse to cut him loose from the case then and there - because, dammit, they do need his help - but he only has so much self-control. He leaves without another word, and allows himself the brief satisfaction of slamming the door to his flat as he leaves.
It does nothing to fill the vacuum in his chest.
----
Lestrade catches a bullet in the side one brilliant Tuesday morning and spends the rest of the daylight hours in surgery while they dig the offending bits of metal out of his body. He drifts in and out of consciousness that evening, his various visitors (Donovan, nurses, doctors) blurring together into one colorful mass in his memory.
There’s only one who stands out, tall and lanky and smelling of soap and chemicals. He steals in and out so quickly that when Lestrade wakes with the following dawn, sore but coherent, he’s sure that Sherlock’s presence at his bedside, and the warmth of the hand on his shoulder, are inventions of his medicine-laden mind.
But the next time he sees Sherlock (crime scene, two victims, classic locked-room mystery) the detective’s gaze lingers on him for a beat longer than necessary and his taunts are unusually tame. He doesn’t even call Lestrade “incompetent” - not once, in six hours.
Suddenly, Lestrade isn’t so sure of his dismissal of that memory.
“You came to the hospital,” he tells Sherlock when it’s just the two of them in the room. He’s paused in writing notes in his pad, and Sherlock grimaces at being interrupted in the middle of his reveal.
“Reciprocity,” is all he says, and launches right back into his story.
----
The gray in his hair starts to migrate back from his temples.
He finds a single strand of silver one day, right at the top of his head, and he immediately plucks it. The next time he thinks to look, he sees that several more have taken its place.
Like a fucking invasion force, he thinks darkly.
----
Lestrade asks Sherlock several times to move from his less-than-desirable flat on Montague Street. He tosses subtle hints and not-so-subtle brochures Sherlock’s way, all of which go ignored by the detective.
It turns to begging after the third murder in a month occurs on that godforsaken street
“Get a flatshare!” Lestrade says finally in exasperation. “Anything; I don’t care! Just get out of that damned building.”
“You aren’t my father, Lestrade,” Sherlock retorts coolly.
“That doesn’t mean I’m not allowed to - “
He breaks off, but Sherlock has already caught his hesitation.
“Not allowed to…?” he prompts.
“Oh, you know damned well what I was going to say,” Lestrade mutters hotly, getting up from his chair and crossing over to the detective. He folds his arms across his chest. “Look, either you move out of that building, or I’ll move you. And you won’t like where I choose to put you.”
Sherlock rolls his eyes. “As if your quaint little holding cells could hold me for long.”
“Long enough for me to find you somewhere else to stay,” Lestrade says, flashing a mirthless smile. “And if nothing else - I’ll drag you back to mine and make you stay on the sofa until I get you sorted. You aren’t a stranger to that, at any rate.”
“Don’t be absurd, Lestrade.” Sherlock snags a file off his desk and begins flipping through it impatiently. “You know as well as I that you’d never be able to keep me there.”
“I wouldn’t underestimate my powers of persuasion.”
“I would, actually.”
“Dammit, Sherlock!”
“Fine,” Sherlock says suddenly, getting to his feet and tugging on his coat. “If I say I’ll consider it, can we move on to the real reason why you called me here?”
Lestrade deflates a little, all of his arguments suddenly becoming moot. Oh, and he had been waiting for this fight; he’d been ready for it.
“Yeah,” he mutters.
“I’ll consider it.”
“God, I hate you sometimes,” he grumbles under his breath, and leads the too-amused detective out of his office.
----
He begins to count the strands of gray as they appear in his hair, believing against all logic that so long as the number is manageable, it doesn’t mean anything.
He stops when there are more gray hairs than years he’s lived on this Earth.
----
They’re at a crime scene one morning, and Sherlock is taking more time than usual to give his deductions. Lestrade thinks darkly that the detective is probably withholding on purpose, either because he wants a greater reaction to his reveal or because he feels like torturing Lestrade with the stench of a body left for a day too long in an enclosed room. He watches Sherlock pace the room, kneel by the body, spring up, kneel back down again, and the movements are frantic enough to make him dizzy.
Then Sherlock paces over to one of the small windows, glances outside, and whips out his mobile. He looks at the screen, frowns, and then curses under his breath. “No signal.”
“Who were you going to call?” Lestrade asks sharply, bristling. He hates when Sherlock does this, calling others for information without even telling Lestrade why he needs to; without saying what connection they might have with the case.
“No one,” Sherlock says sharply. “I need to look up when sunset was last night.”
He moves to leave, striding briskly towards the door, when Lestrade says, “Six-thirty-four.”
Sherlock turns back to him, raising an eyebrow. Lestrade offers a wry grin.
“I have my uses now and then. Next time, ask first. Might be able to help.”
“All right,” Sherlock says slowly, considering. “When was moonrise?”
“‘Bout...nine in the morning,” Lestrade answers. “Wouldn’t have been very noticeable.”
“And what stars could she have seen from her window?”
Lestrade glances out the small glass square set in the wall.
“Let’s see,” he says, getting his bearings. “Her window faces west, so she might’ve been able to see...Leo, this time of year. But most days it depends on light and weather.”
He turns back to the detective. “And last night she wouldn’t have been able to see anything at all, if that’s what you’re looking for. Light pollution and clouds made sure of that.”
Sherlock is staring at him, head cocked slightly to one side, a curious look on his face. Lestrade shifts uncomfortably under the gaze and says, “Does...that help?”
“Lestrade,” Sherlock says suddenly, snapping out of himself and making to bound from the room, “I may have just caught your murderer!”
“You did, eh?” Lestrade mutters to himself, amused, but hurries after him anyway. After all, he may know these facts, but Sherlock’s the only one who can assemble them into something sensible as quickly as he does.
They make a good team, now and again.
---
They’re standing in Lestrade’s office, and Sherlock has just come in from the cold, his eyes overly-bright with the sting of the late autumn wind and his cheeks tinged a light pink. He’s talking about one of Lestrade’s cases, gesturing madly, still in his coat because the heat of the building has yet to penetrate his chilled limbs.
Unconsciously, Lestrade wraps his hands around Sherlock’s alabaster ones, feeling as though he’s gripping solid ice, and starts to rub some heat back into them while Sherlock continues to throw information at him, his stream of deductions unbroken by the physical contact.
Later, Lestrade catches Sally throwing him bemused looks, and it takes the rest of the afternoon for him to figure out why.
----
“You’re bisexual.”
Lestrade spares Sherlock half a glance and then returns to his paperwork. “If you like.”
“You are.”
“All right.”
“In the past year, you have slept with two women and one man. The year before -”
“Don’t get yourself hung up on the particulars of my sex life, Sherlock,” Lestrade says mildly. “You’ll only hurt that brain of yours.”
He had known that, at some point, Sherlock would begin deducing him - frankly, he’s surprised that it hasn’t come sooner. But the expression on Sherlock’s face right now...if Lestrade didn’t know any better, he would have said that it looked hesitant, as if he wasn’t sure of his next words.
“You like it.”
“What?” Lestrade glances up again, and then goes back to his forms. “Sex? Yeah, I do. Why?”
“Nothing.” Sherlock returns to his food, cool mask sliding back into place, looking entirely unconcerned.
“Ah. Right.”
He doesn’t even pretend to understand anymore.
----
There are certain things that Lestrade can count as constants in his life. He knows that his newspaper will be delivered to his door at half past five every morning. He knows that bad things happen to good people, good things happen to bad people, and that the prize at the bottom of the cereal box is always smaller than you think it will be.
He also knows that every conversation with Sherlock will end in argument.
“I still don’t understand how you possibly could have known that it was the sister!”
“I was right, though, wasn’t I?’
Lestrade sighs. “Yeah, ‘course you were.”
“Then I fail to see why you still want to understand. It’s probably beyond you, anyway.”
Lestrade passes a hand over his eyes and stares blankly at the file he has open on Sherlock’s kitchen table. “Your confidence in me is staggering.”
“Mm, yes. I’m still not entirely sure why that is. I’m sure it’s misplaced; I just can’t figure out why.”
Lestrade stares at him. He’s sitting on the sofa in the other room, violin in one hand and bow in the other, not playing but simply holding them. “That was sarcasm, idiot!”
Sherlock fixes him with a look and one of his classic segues. “You should go to bed.”
Lestrade snorts and rubs the back of his neck with a weary hand. His bed is a good twenty minutes away yet, and more if he actually goes to bed instead of just falling asleep on the sofa.
“Which is an entirely irrelevant observation,” Sherlock says to the unvoiced thought, “as you’ll be sleeping here.”
“Oh.” Lestrade blinks, momentarily thrown. “I will?”
This is a new development. It’s not often that they end up at Sherlock’s, and when they do Lestrade rarely stays the night. He’s only done so a handful of times, mostly on nights when he’s dragged an injured Sherlock back to the place and is tending to his wounds. On nights like that they usually are awake for the dawn and he doesn’t exactly count it as “staying over.” Once or twice he’s fallen asleep while working on a case with Sherlock, usually on the sofa, and when he wakes in the morning the detective is always gone. This is unexpected.
This is new.
“Are you sure?” he asks finally when his last query receives no response from the detective, immersed as he is in his thoughts.
“You have to be up in five hours,” Sherlock tells him. “Ideally, you in particular require eight-and-a-half hours in order to function optimally, but five will do. Any less, and you become...irritable. And ineffective. It makes more sense for you to stay here for the evening, as the drive home now and the drive to the Yard in the morning will severely cut into your time spent asleep.”
“That your way of saying that you’re concerned?” Lestrade mutters, standing and stretching out his aching back. He goes over to the sofa and Sherlock moves to accommodate him, but the piece of furniture is small for two grown men - especially when one of them sprawls like Sherlock does - and their knees jostle.
“I’m merely stating facts,” Sherlock tells him.
“Of course.”
“And anyway, Lestrade, you have severely miscalculated where the bedroom is located. I believe you meant to go in the opposite direction.”
Lestrade blinks at him.
“You want me in your room,” he says dumbly. Sherlock gives a careful shrug and plucks a string of his violin.
“I have experiments yet to conclude out here. It’s only logical that you attempt to sleep in the one area of the flat where noise is bound to be minimal. And before you ask again if I’m certain - I wouldn’t have offered if I wasn’t, now, would I?” Sherlock flashes him a grin.
“Ah - right, then,” Lestrade says, biting back the words he wants to ask anyway. “Well - if you’re sure -”
“Have you ever known me not to voice my opinion, Lestrade?”
“I...suppose not.”
Sherlock lifts the violin to his chin and draws his bow along the strings, signalling an end to the conversation. Lestrade listens to the melancholy tune for some moments and, when he realizes that it’s lulling him into a doze, makes his way to the bedroom tucked in the back of the flat.
He wakes an hour later to a slight dip in the bed that signals Sherlock’s arrival and, still hazy with sleep, he drapes an arm across the pillows. Sherlock slips, cat-like, under the blankets and settles against his side, resting his head on the open arm. Lestrade rests his hand on Sherlock’s lower back and mutters something that might either be, “G’night,” or “Idiot,” and Sherlock lets out a soft huff of breath that brushes against Lestrade’s neck.
He knows the detective will be gone when he wakes in the morning (he is) and he knows that his alarm will startle him (it does). They are just two more things on his growing list of constants. And, as Lestrade lies awake in the unfamiliar bed and contemplates the fact that the sleep he got last night was the deepest he’s had in years, he realizes that he knows something else, now, too.
----
Winter creeps up on Lestrade in the same manner it does every year - one morning he looks outside his window and admires the colors of the trees; the next, frost is clinging to the branches and the leaves are brown and fallen.
He hasn’t seen much of the season in the weeks since that first frost, apart from his chilly commute and the occasional homicide that occurs out in the open. He hadn’t seen much of autumn either, admittedly, and what he’d seen of summer had been through the open windows of his sweltering flat.
Nonetheless, the season has turned once again without his permission or, really, even his notice, and he contemplates the chilly gray of the city for a moment from his window before turning back to his paperwork.
He’s scrawled his name across a dizzying amount of forms today, and he sits for a moment considering his signature. It looks like a bit of controlled chaos - the strong and legible “G” and “L” are followed by smaller letters that are really just glorified scribbles - and it’s such a curious thing, his name.
There’s his surname, which is used so often it might as well be his given one. It means different things on the lips of different people; it carries different meanings depending even on the time of day. Donovan - no, Sally, she prefers Sally when not at the Yard - says it with a kind of affection when they’re off-duty, even if they’re discussing Sherlock. She doesn’t understand Lestrade’s soft spot for the man - and, to be fair, neither does Lestrade - and has never been able to hide her disdain.
Lestrade knows that she means well, though; she looks out for him. She’s aware that at some point during the last year the dynamic shifted between her boss and Sherlock, though she can’t pin it down any more than Lestrade can, and has tried to warn him off multiple times.
He’ll always let you down.
Par for the course, Lestrade decides, and moves to get his jacket. He knows when to call it a night, and ten minutes contemplating a name (and his own to boot) is one of those times.
But his tired musings don’t stop there, and drift, as they always do, to Sherlock. Sherlock, who uses his surname as a title during the day and as a name later on, when it’s just the two of them. Sherlock, who wields it like a whip at the crime scenes - “It’s a wonder, Lestrade, that you even manage to find the brainpower to dress yourself in the mornings, much less hold down a job.” - and handles it softly at night - “You should sleep, Lestrade; you’re little good to anyone like this.”
There’s also “Detective Inspector,” which has a hint of respect when coming from his people and is mocking when it comes from Sherlock. There are his initials, used when marking paperwork or in Sherlock’s hasty texts. They are formal when he uses them and almost intimate when used by the detective.
And then there’s “Greg,” which no one’s called him since the day his mother passed away. Sally used it once, at pub night, but it must’ve sounded as foreign and strange to her as it did Lestrade because she never did it again.
It’s some days later that he hears his name used by Sherlock for the first time. They’re standing in the detective’s living room, and the man’s hair is wild from repeatedly running his fingers through it. Lestrade knows he looks no better, having caught a glimpse of himself earlier in a darkened window. They’re going over the particulars of a case, which Sherlock had been rather gleeful about earlier in the day - “It’s clever, Lestrade, really clever; puts the Stinson case from last year to shame.” - but right now it’s causing Lestrade nothing but frustration.
“Look, Sherlock,” he says in exasperation, “either you give me a straight answer, or -”
“Or what?” Sherlock snaps back. “You’ll leave? How original. And what good would that do you? You case will remain unsolved.”
“My people are more than capable -”
“If they were ‘more than capable,’ you wouldn’t be here right now.”
Lestrade holds up his hands, as much to calm himself as Sherlock. “Look, I’m just trying to speed things along and I thought you might appreciate the work. If not, I have better things to do than stand here and listen to you insult my team.”
He reaches for the files, gathering all the paperwork into the appropriate folders. Sherlock lets out a dramatic breath and flops down onto the sofa.
"Then leave, Greg," he says, waving a hand at Lestrade. "But did you really think I asked you here to go over a case I worked out the answer to hours ago?"
"Well, I can't believe that you'd want me around otherwise," Lestrade mutters irritably. "Thought I was an idiot, like everyone else. You've said so, often enough."
"Oh, you are," Sherlock says. "But you are hardly 'everyone else.'"
“What am I, then?” Lestrade snaps before he can stop himself, and it surprises him because that hadn’t been what he’d meant to say at all. Sherlock turns his head and regards him solemnly for a few moments.
“Does it matter?” he says finally.
“Yeah. Yeah, it does, a bit,” Lestrade says, and rakes a shaking hand through his hair. Jesus, but he’s not good with this stuff to begin with, and now he feels ready to about crawl out of his skin in frustration. He can’t make any sort of sense of his life right now - everything is in contradiction, and the more he thinks about it the more it weighs on him, tugging him first one way and then the other, until he feels ready to about split in two. He already is a bundle of nerves as it is, though he buries it well, but add into that the pile of paradoxes that is Sherlock Holmes...
Sherlock, who has spent the occasional night in his bed since that first one last winter, though it’s never been more than that.
Sherlock, who is at once eighty-seven and eighteen.
Sherlock, who is a man of contradictions.
“You’re...tolerable,” Sherlock decides finally. “More so than the others, at any rate.”
Lestrade massages the back of his neck, realizing that he needs to amend his recent realization. Names are curious, yes, but they are also inadequate, and especially so where Sherlock is concerned. Titles, labels, definitions - they’re all ill-fitting and just wrong. Father-figure works well enough during the day, for him; he can accept it with relative ease. Minder fits as well; mentor, less so, but it works in a pinch. The dividing line between him and Sherlock is clear during the day, and that’s the only time when the labels make any sort of sense. Here, in the dark, when it’s only the two of them - nothing quite seems to fit. The names he tries to mentally apply to them refuse to stay - they’re always too little, never too much, and slip away from him like water through cupped hands, as though they were never meant to be there in the first place.
And then he realizes that it’s the names that are wrong. How does one pin a label on the worry he feels when he catches sight of the too-thin figure; when he sees shocking bone poking out from the open collar and blood pooled under tired eyes? How does one put a name to the small ball of warmth that settles in his chest on the nights when he looks up from his paperwork to see Sherlock casually standing in the doorway?
Paternal concern isn’t a phrase he can hide behind for very long, especially not with the number of times Sherlock has spent the night and the hesitant half-touches (brushing shoulders; bumping elbows) they trade in his office when the lights are low and the air strangely still.
They haven’t needed names thus far, and Lestrade’s not sure why he feels they need them now. Actions have always served them better. Fingertips, feather-light, on the back of the neck and firm hands that land on bony shoulders convey more than sentences neither of them would ever be able to string together anyway. They could struggle for years for words that can, just as easily, be conveyed in the clasp of a hand.
And the words wouldn’t fit, anyway.
“All right, take me through it again,” Lestrade says eventually, realizing that his silence has stretched into uncomfortable lengths, though Sherlock doesn’t seem to have noticed. Lestrade spreads the files back out on the table and hands the crime scene photographs to the detective. “From the top.”
----
It would figure that Sherlock Holmes would be the type of man to have a relative with a nasty habit of kidnapping people.
Lestrade doesn’t know why it didn’t occur to him sooner that the man would come from a family as eccentric as he is; a family made up of people who find that things done the normal way - the easy way - aren’t worth doing at all.
Conversations, for instance, aren’t worth having unless you can make a show of it.
And, looking back on it later, Lestrade has to admit that Mycroft Holmes puts on a hell of a show.
Lestrade gives the elder Holmes’ men the slip three times before they are finally able to nab him, and Mycroft is so impressed that he does nothing more than offer his congratulations, which baffles Lestrade more than frightens him because at the time he has no idea who the strange man in the immaculate suit even is, let alone why he’s congratulating him.
He can guess at one of those things, however.
“I think I met your brother the other day,” Lestrade tells Sherlock the next time they see one another. It’s raining, and they’re standing over a woman’s body.
“Oh?” Sherlock says, wholly disinterested. “What makes you think that?”
“He kidnapped me, said he was your arch-enemy, and then invited me to Christmas dinner.”
Sherlock’s face darkens and he spares Lestrade half a glance, which is more than he normally gets when there’s an interesting murder on.
“His name is Mycroft,” Sherlock says shortly.
“Sherlock and Mycroft,” Lestrade muses. “Your mother must really have had it in for you two.”
“Mmm,” Sherlock says distractedly. “You should have heard what she named the cat.”
----
Lestrade wears glasses now - for reading purposes only, but it’s a defeat all the same; one more remnant of youth chipped away by the encroaching twilight. He keeps them at home and squints his way through the workday, because it’s the last bit of defiance he can show middle age.
Sherlock is vicious in his jibes - because he knows, of course he does - but occasionally he’ll take pity on the DI.
“The third child was illegitimate,” he tells Lestrade one evening in his office.
“Oh? How d’you figure?” Lestrade asks absently, mind on his paperwork.
“You could tell by - no, signature goes there, Lestrade,” he says impatiently, jabbing at a spot further down on the page with an elegant finger. “Honestly.”
“Ah. Right.” Lestrade scrawls his name. “Thanks.”
Sherlock huffs and launches back into his story, gesticulating madly, and his eyesight may be poor but Lestrade could have sworn that he caught the faint shadow of a small smile on the detective’s lips.
----
Lestrade tends not to make it much further than the sofa these days, and so it’s a pleasant surprise when he wakes one morning to find that he’d actually made it to his bed the night before. The unpleasant surprise comes when he looks at the clock and realizes that he’s only minutes away from his alarm, which comes at an ungodly enough hour as it is. It feels as though he’s slept one hour, not four, and he sighs.
The sun is just starting to light the horizon by the time he’s showered and dressed, and he makes his way to the kitchen for coffee. He’s running short on time today - caught himself staring senselessly at the wall during his shower and lost a good ten minutes in blank contemplation of it - but he won’t be any good to his people (or anyone for that matter) without his usual early dose of caffeine.
It shouldn’t surprise him, really, to find Sherlock in his kitchen.
After a moment of careful thought, he decides that it isn’t the fact that Sherlock is in his flat that’s surprising. It’s more the fact that Sherlock has made coffee (enough for the both of them) and is leaning casually against the counter, book in one hand and mug in the other, looking entirely at ease.
“Lestrade,” he greets without looking up. Lestrade recovers from his surprise relatively quickly and makes for the coffee pot.
“Have you been here long?”
“Mmm. A few hours. I required your kitchen.” Sherlock sets aside his book and tucks his free hand in his pocket.
The kitchen looks good with him in it, Lestrade decides as he pours his first mug of coffee; looks right.
“I’ve got to be off in about five minutes. Help yourself to anything in the fridge; Lord knows you need it.” He wonders for a moment whether the coffee is actually part of Sherlock’s experiment, and then decides that he simply doesn’t care.
The room is small, and he has to reach around Sherlock in order to grab the milk sitting out on the counter. He touches the detective’s upper arm and mutters, “Excuse me,” and doesn’t get much further than that, because when he turns his head Sherlock is right there and their eyes have locked and he is done for.
Sherlock’s eyes flick to Lestrade’s lips for the briefest of moments before snapping back up, locking him in place. And then he leans in.
It’s little more than a caress, velvet lips brushing against dry ones; just a whisper of a touch that’s over before Lestrade’s brain can catch up with his body. The only thing he registers is the unexpected softness of Sherlock’s lips, so wildly different from the rest of the man. He is fire and fury, never content to do anything halfway or even gently, brusque and frenzied in everything he touches and does. But the kiss is gentle, as if Sherlock was handling something delicate.
It’s over before it really even started, and Lestrade’s hand closes on the milk as they break apart. He steps around the detective to add it to his mug while Sherlock returns to his book and they pass Lestrade’s final few minutes at home in silence, leaning against the counter, shoulders pressed together.
“Right, should be off,” Lestrade says eventually. “Can you manage?”
“I know how to use the front door, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“Don’t blow up the kitchen while I’m gone - or any room, for that matter,” Lestrade orders, and gives Sherlock’s too-thin arm a gentle squeeze as he leaves the room. “And for the love of God, eat something.”
----
Part Three
Characters: Sherlock Holmes, DI Lestrade, Ensemble
Pairing: Lestrade/OCs (mentioned); Lestrade/Sherlock
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: I don’t own them
Word Count: c. 6,500 (this part); c. 35,000 total
Warnings: Language; Age Discrepancy; Mild Sexuality; Drug Use
Spoilers: None
Betas: sidneysussex, gentlest_sin, archea2
Summary: Greg Lestrade is forty-three when he saves the life of a brilliant drug-addict. Two years later, he's starting to realize there are some certainties to his life now that Sherlock Holmes is part of it. He's going gray quickly, for one thing. He starts finding experiments in his kitchen. And he may even be, inexplicably, beginning to care for the detective. A series of vignettes that cover the five years leading up to “A Study In Pink.”
Prologue (with full Author’s Notes)
Part One
Notes for Part Two: Well, apparently all my Lestrades are destined to be astronomy nerds. You have been warned.
-----
Lestrade has had a key for Montague Street almost from the start, mostly because it saved him from having to break down the door every time that he needed Sherlock’s assistance and partially because he occasionally needed to keep Sherlock from doing lasting damage to himself. Sherlock’s never needed a key for Lestrade’s place - no matter how many times Lestrade has changed the locks, the detective still manages to find a way in. Just because he’s never needed one, however, doesn’t mean he shouldn’t have one, and Lestrade mulls this over for a few weeks before coming to the inevitable decision.
“I’d very much appreciate if you stopped antagonizing my team,” Lestrade is telling him one night as they consume a late dinner - or early breakfast, depending on how one wanted to look at it - in his office.
“And I’d very much appreciate if they stopped being idiots. It doesn’t look like either is going to happen in the near future - or without divine intervention - so I suggest you drop it,” Sherlock tells him. “Are you going to eat that?”
Lestrade stifles a snort and pushes over his abandoned container of food. Sherlock is like that - he never eats while on a case, but in between he’ll consume anything and everything put in front of him. Lestrade has gotten into the habit of leaving food out around his flat - bagel in the bathroom, soup in the kitchen, juice by the sofa - and Sherlock will put everything away without even noticing that he’s doing it. The man’s metabolism - and appetite - is staggering.
Something pokes him in the leg as he leans over to pass his food, and with a soft, “Oh! Right,” he digs a key chain out of his pocket.
“Here,” he says, tossing it at Sherlock. The detective catches it deftly in his left hand without interrupting his eating. “I’ve been meaning to give that to you. Thought it might come in handy.”
“Key to your flat,” Sherlock murmurs to himself, turning it over in his hand once before pocketing it. “Right. Might do, at that.”
And it does, because it’s not long after that (days, at most) when Lestrade wakes to a familiar creak and thud - the door to his flat opening and closing. He twists his head to look at the unforgiving numbers on his clock - 3:12 - and lays there for a moment, listening. He hears a sound a bit like shuffling feet and sighs because he recognizes the tread. It takes a moment for him to persuade his limbs to move, and then he clambers unsteadily out of bed, snatching up his dressing gown on his way out the door.
“Can’t sleep?” he asks the figure who has invaded his living room. He tightens the dressing gown around his pajamas and folds his arms, leaning against the door frame.
“It’s a wonder, Lestrade,” Sherlock says dully from where he has thrown himself on the sofa, “that you haven’t advanced higher at the Yard. Your deductive skills are truly astounding.”
“A simple yes would do just fine, wanker,” Lestrade says. “What do you care about sleep, anyway? I thought it got in the way of the work. Everything else being transport and all.”
“Sadly,” Sherlock says with disdain, “even the most perfect of machines requires maintenance now and again. Usually I am able to ignore it, but that only works for so long.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t ignore it, then,” Lestrade tells him, striding over to the sofa. “Come on; budge up.”
“There’s no room -”
“There would be if you lifted your legs,” he points out, and that’s logic even Sherlock can’t argue with.
Sherlock heaves a sigh and hauls himself into a sitting position, preparing to swing his legs onto the floor. Lestrade is, for once, too quick, and he slides onto the cushion where Sherlock’s back had just been pressed, snaking an arm around the younger man and tugging him close. Sherlock falls back against his chest with an indignant sound of protest, but Lestrade mutters, “Relax, sunshine. Only trying to help.”
“How is this helping?”
“Helps not to be alone, sometimes.” Lestrade scoots down so he is fully relaxed against the back of the sofa, legs outstretched before him. Sherlock’s head is now tucked just underneath his chin. “Comfortable?”
There is a slight pause before Sherlock answers, “Yes,” and to Lestrade’s ears the voice is hesitant, as though he’s surprised himself with his answer.
“Good,” he whispers, rubbing Sherlock’s upper arm with his free hand. “That’s good. I suppose it’s a waste of breath to ask what it was about?”
“And yet you wasted the breath anyway.” But Sherlock shifts and settles fully against him, so Lestrade counts that as a small victory and thinks that it wasn’t wasted, after all. He keeps his hand on the man’s arm, gently rubbing, and after several long moments of this he feels the tension begin to ease from the taut shoulders.
The detective drops into a doze not long after, and stays that way through the final hours of Lestrade’s night and his usual morning routine. He tosses a blanket over Sherlock before leaving for the Yard, and when he returns that evening the door has been locked and the blanket neatly folded and put away - all signs of Sherlock’s presence erased.
----
He goes gray at the temples first.
It isn’t something he notices until well after the hair around his ears has started to fade, and he touches it with dismay the morning it finally becomes apparent to him. He had hoped - well, his hair did hang onto its color for years longer than it should have. He’s well into his forties now - at least he’s had it this long.
It doesn’t stop him from shutting off the bathroom light and continuing his morning routine in semi-darkness.
----
Lestrade stumbles up the stairs to his flat one crisp autumn night, Sherlock in tow. They’ve come straight from a crime scene, and Lestrade knows it will be a couple of hours before he’s needed again. He’s brought Sherlock along with the intention of forcibly feeding him whatever he has in the fridge, and perhaps shoving a pot of coffee at him in the process. He’d danced around the crime scene with pupils gone unnaturally wide and there was a thin, high-strung quality to his gait. Lestrade can’t be certain of it, not tonight, but he has his suspicions about what Sherlock’s been getting up to lately in his free time.
But the first thing he does is make for the bathroom once they’re inside his flat, because there’s blood clinging to his hands that doesn’t belong to him and right now all he wants to do is crawl out of his skin. He doesn’t even bother taking the time to close his front door, and so Sherlock does it for him.
“I need to speak to the mother,” the detective tells him, following him into the bathroom and casually leaning against the open door while Lestrade runs the water - hot, too hot, enough to make him want to recoil from the contact - and begins methodically scrubbing the blood and grime from his fingers.
“We’ve already taken her statement,” Lestrade tells him tightly.
“You forget that I was there, Lestrade. And she lied to you, in case you care to know.”
“You can’t possibly know that.”
“Are you honestly this stupid?” Sherlock snaps. “She maintained eye contact, which indicates she was trying to appear sincere. When humans are remembering, they generally let their gaze fall on immobile objects in order to focus and remember. She also kept looking to your left - an indication that she was inventing details. She would have looked to your right if she was attempting to remember something.”
“Right, well, I’ll take it into consideration, but that’s hardly evidence.” Lestrade grabs a towel and rubs his hands raw, sitting down heavily on the closed lid of the toilet. He’s torn between wanting Sherlock to stay and wishing he would leave, because the man’s outrageous lack of compassion is grating on his already thin nerves but at the same time, should he be left alone he knows all he will be able to think about is that room.
And that child.
“All I need is to -”
“Dammit, Sherlock!” Lestrade drops his head into his hands, pressing his palms to his eyes. Lines of gold are scorched into his eyelids from the lamp, and the surrounding darkness does nothing to blot out the pictures still surfacing in his mind. “Enough.”
“Oh, what now?” Sherlock says in exasperation. “It’s been hours, Lestrade. Surely you aren’t still upset.”
“Hours?” Lestrade says with a huff. “It doesn’t go away in a few hours, Sherlock. It doesn’t even really ever go away at all. A child died tonight - do you even care about that?”
“Caring won’t bring her back,” Sherlock says dismissively, waving a hand at him, “so you may as well stop now. You’re little good to me like this. Pull yourself together, or leave.”
“Sherlock -”
“What good will it do?” Sherlock says suddenly, rounding on him, and Lestrade is hit with the full, unfiltered blast of his intensity. He’s interrupted Sherlock in the middle of a deduction, cut him off, and now that unfocused energy hits him like a blast. “People die, Lestrade, and you of anyone should realize that. Caring about it is what has held you back, and I see no reason to make the same mistake. Besides, why care about a dead child when her murderer is being infinitely more interesting?”
Lestrade resists the impulse to cut him loose from the case then and there - because, dammit, they do need his help - but he only has so much self-control. He leaves without another word, and allows himself the brief satisfaction of slamming the door to his flat as he leaves.
It does nothing to fill the vacuum in his chest.
----
Lestrade catches a bullet in the side one brilliant Tuesday morning and spends the rest of the daylight hours in surgery while they dig the offending bits of metal out of his body. He drifts in and out of consciousness that evening, his various visitors (Donovan, nurses, doctors) blurring together into one colorful mass in his memory.
There’s only one who stands out, tall and lanky and smelling of soap and chemicals. He steals in and out so quickly that when Lestrade wakes with the following dawn, sore but coherent, he’s sure that Sherlock’s presence at his bedside, and the warmth of the hand on his shoulder, are inventions of his medicine-laden mind.
But the next time he sees Sherlock (crime scene, two victims, classic locked-room mystery) the detective’s gaze lingers on him for a beat longer than necessary and his taunts are unusually tame. He doesn’t even call Lestrade “incompetent” - not once, in six hours.
Suddenly, Lestrade isn’t so sure of his dismissal of that memory.
“You came to the hospital,” he tells Sherlock when it’s just the two of them in the room. He’s paused in writing notes in his pad, and Sherlock grimaces at being interrupted in the middle of his reveal.
“Reciprocity,” is all he says, and launches right back into his story.
----
The gray in his hair starts to migrate back from his temples.
He finds a single strand of silver one day, right at the top of his head, and he immediately plucks it. The next time he thinks to look, he sees that several more have taken its place.
Like a fucking invasion force, he thinks darkly.
----
Lestrade asks Sherlock several times to move from his less-than-desirable flat on Montague Street. He tosses subtle hints and not-so-subtle brochures Sherlock’s way, all of which go ignored by the detective.
It turns to begging after the third murder in a month occurs on that godforsaken street
“Get a flatshare!” Lestrade says finally in exasperation. “Anything; I don’t care! Just get out of that damned building.”
“You aren’t my father, Lestrade,” Sherlock retorts coolly.
“That doesn’t mean I’m not allowed to - “
He breaks off, but Sherlock has already caught his hesitation.
“Not allowed to…?” he prompts.
“Oh, you know damned well what I was going to say,” Lestrade mutters hotly, getting up from his chair and crossing over to the detective. He folds his arms across his chest. “Look, either you move out of that building, or I’ll move you. And you won’t like where I choose to put you.”
Sherlock rolls his eyes. “As if your quaint little holding cells could hold me for long.”
“Long enough for me to find you somewhere else to stay,” Lestrade says, flashing a mirthless smile. “And if nothing else - I’ll drag you back to mine and make you stay on the sofa until I get you sorted. You aren’t a stranger to that, at any rate.”
“Don’t be absurd, Lestrade.” Sherlock snags a file off his desk and begins flipping through it impatiently. “You know as well as I that you’d never be able to keep me there.”
“I wouldn’t underestimate my powers of persuasion.”
“I would, actually.”
“Dammit, Sherlock!”
“Fine,” Sherlock says suddenly, getting to his feet and tugging on his coat. “If I say I’ll consider it, can we move on to the real reason why you called me here?”
Lestrade deflates a little, all of his arguments suddenly becoming moot. Oh, and he had been waiting for this fight; he’d been ready for it.
“Yeah,” he mutters.
“I’ll consider it.”
“God, I hate you sometimes,” he grumbles under his breath, and leads the too-amused detective out of his office.
----
He begins to count the strands of gray as they appear in his hair, believing against all logic that so long as the number is manageable, it doesn’t mean anything.
He stops when there are more gray hairs than years he’s lived on this Earth.
----
They’re at a crime scene one morning, and Sherlock is taking more time than usual to give his deductions. Lestrade thinks darkly that the detective is probably withholding on purpose, either because he wants a greater reaction to his reveal or because he feels like torturing Lestrade with the stench of a body left for a day too long in an enclosed room. He watches Sherlock pace the room, kneel by the body, spring up, kneel back down again, and the movements are frantic enough to make him dizzy.
Then Sherlock paces over to one of the small windows, glances outside, and whips out his mobile. He looks at the screen, frowns, and then curses under his breath. “No signal.”
“Who were you going to call?” Lestrade asks sharply, bristling. He hates when Sherlock does this, calling others for information without even telling Lestrade why he needs to; without saying what connection they might have with the case.
“No one,” Sherlock says sharply. “I need to look up when sunset was last night.”
He moves to leave, striding briskly towards the door, when Lestrade says, “Six-thirty-four.”
Sherlock turns back to him, raising an eyebrow. Lestrade offers a wry grin.
“I have my uses now and then. Next time, ask first. Might be able to help.”
“All right,” Sherlock says slowly, considering. “When was moonrise?”
“‘Bout...nine in the morning,” Lestrade answers. “Wouldn’t have been very noticeable.”
“And what stars could she have seen from her window?”
Lestrade glances out the small glass square set in the wall.
“Let’s see,” he says, getting his bearings. “Her window faces west, so she might’ve been able to see...Leo, this time of year. But most days it depends on light and weather.”
He turns back to the detective. “And last night she wouldn’t have been able to see anything at all, if that’s what you’re looking for. Light pollution and clouds made sure of that.”
Sherlock is staring at him, head cocked slightly to one side, a curious look on his face. Lestrade shifts uncomfortably under the gaze and says, “Does...that help?”
“Lestrade,” Sherlock says suddenly, snapping out of himself and making to bound from the room, “I may have just caught your murderer!”
“You did, eh?” Lestrade mutters to himself, amused, but hurries after him anyway. After all, he may know these facts, but Sherlock’s the only one who can assemble them into something sensible as quickly as he does.
They make a good team, now and again.
---
They’re standing in Lestrade’s office, and Sherlock has just come in from the cold, his eyes overly-bright with the sting of the late autumn wind and his cheeks tinged a light pink. He’s talking about one of Lestrade’s cases, gesturing madly, still in his coat because the heat of the building has yet to penetrate his chilled limbs.
Unconsciously, Lestrade wraps his hands around Sherlock’s alabaster ones, feeling as though he’s gripping solid ice, and starts to rub some heat back into them while Sherlock continues to throw information at him, his stream of deductions unbroken by the physical contact.
Later, Lestrade catches Sally throwing him bemused looks, and it takes the rest of the afternoon for him to figure out why.
----
“You’re bisexual.”
Lestrade spares Sherlock half a glance and then returns to his paperwork. “If you like.”
“You are.”
“All right.”
“In the past year, you have slept with two women and one man. The year before -”
“Don’t get yourself hung up on the particulars of my sex life, Sherlock,” Lestrade says mildly. “You’ll only hurt that brain of yours.”
He had known that, at some point, Sherlock would begin deducing him - frankly, he’s surprised that it hasn’t come sooner. But the expression on Sherlock’s face right now...if Lestrade didn’t know any better, he would have said that it looked hesitant, as if he wasn’t sure of his next words.
“You like it.”
“What?” Lestrade glances up again, and then goes back to his forms. “Sex? Yeah, I do. Why?”
“Nothing.” Sherlock returns to his food, cool mask sliding back into place, looking entirely unconcerned.
“Ah. Right.”
He doesn’t even pretend to understand anymore.
----
There are certain things that Lestrade can count as constants in his life. He knows that his newspaper will be delivered to his door at half past five every morning. He knows that bad things happen to good people, good things happen to bad people, and that the prize at the bottom of the cereal box is always smaller than you think it will be.
He also knows that every conversation with Sherlock will end in argument.
“I still don’t understand how you possibly could have known that it was the sister!”
“I was right, though, wasn’t I?’
Lestrade sighs. “Yeah, ‘course you were.”
“Then I fail to see why you still want to understand. It’s probably beyond you, anyway.”
Lestrade passes a hand over his eyes and stares blankly at the file he has open on Sherlock’s kitchen table. “Your confidence in me is staggering.”
“Mm, yes. I’m still not entirely sure why that is. I’m sure it’s misplaced; I just can’t figure out why.”
Lestrade stares at him. He’s sitting on the sofa in the other room, violin in one hand and bow in the other, not playing but simply holding them. “That was sarcasm, idiot!”
Sherlock fixes him with a look and one of his classic segues. “You should go to bed.”
Lestrade snorts and rubs the back of his neck with a weary hand. His bed is a good twenty minutes away yet, and more if he actually goes to bed instead of just falling asleep on the sofa.
“Which is an entirely irrelevant observation,” Sherlock says to the unvoiced thought, “as you’ll be sleeping here.”
“Oh.” Lestrade blinks, momentarily thrown. “I will?”
This is a new development. It’s not often that they end up at Sherlock’s, and when they do Lestrade rarely stays the night. He’s only done so a handful of times, mostly on nights when he’s dragged an injured Sherlock back to the place and is tending to his wounds. On nights like that they usually are awake for the dawn and he doesn’t exactly count it as “staying over.” Once or twice he’s fallen asleep while working on a case with Sherlock, usually on the sofa, and when he wakes in the morning the detective is always gone. This is unexpected.
This is new.
“Are you sure?” he asks finally when his last query receives no response from the detective, immersed as he is in his thoughts.
“You have to be up in five hours,” Sherlock tells him. “Ideally, you in particular require eight-and-a-half hours in order to function optimally, but five will do. Any less, and you become...irritable. And ineffective. It makes more sense for you to stay here for the evening, as the drive home now and the drive to the Yard in the morning will severely cut into your time spent asleep.”
“That your way of saying that you’re concerned?” Lestrade mutters, standing and stretching out his aching back. He goes over to the sofa and Sherlock moves to accommodate him, but the piece of furniture is small for two grown men - especially when one of them sprawls like Sherlock does - and their knees jostle.
“I’m merely stating facts,” Sherlock tells him.
“Of course.”
“And anyway, Lestrade, you have severely miscalculated where the bedroom is located. I believe you meant to go in the opposite direction.”
Lestrade blinks at him.
“You want me in your room,” he says dumbly. Sherlock gives a careful shrug and plucks a string of his violin.
“I have experiments yet to conclude out here. It’s only logical that you attempt to sleep in the one area of the flat where noise is bound to be minimal. And before you ask again if I’m certain - I wouldn’t have offered if I wasn’t, now, would I?” Sherlock flashes him a grin.
“Ah - right, then,” Lestrade says, biting back the words he wants to ask anyway. “Well - if you’re sure -”
“Have you ever known me not to voice my opinion, Lestrade?”
“I...suppose not.”
Sherlock lifts the violin to his chin and draws his bow along the strings, signalling an end to the conversation. Lestrade listens to the melancholy tune for some moments and, when he realizes that it’s lulling him into a doze, makes his way to the bedroom tucked in the back of the flat.
He wakes an hour later to a slight dip in the bed that signals Sherlock’s arrival and, still hazy with sleep, he drapes an arm across the pillows. Sherlock slips, cat-like, under the blankets and settles against his side, resting his head on the open arm. Lestrade rests his hand on Sherlock’s lower back and mutters something that might either be, “G’night,” or “Idiot,” and Sherlock lets out a soft huff of breath that brushes against Lestrade’s neck.
He knows the detective will be gone when he wakes in the morning (he is) and he knows that his alarm will startle him (it does). They are just two more things on his growing list of constants. And, as Lestrade lies awake in the unfamiliar bed and contemplates the fact that the sleep he got last night was the deepest he’s had in years, he realizes that he knows something else, now, too.
----
Winter creeps up on Lestrade in the same manner it does every year - one morning he looks outside his window and admires the colors of the trees; the next, frost is clinging to the branches and the leaves are brown and fallen.
He hasn’t seen much of the season in the weeks since that first frost, apart from his chilly commute and the occasional homicide that occurs out in the open. He hadn’t seen much of autumn either, admittedly, and what he’d seen of summer had been through the open windows of his sweltering flat.
Nonetheless, the season has turned once again without his permission or, really, even his notice, and he contemplates the chilly gray of the city for a moment from his window before turning back to his paperwork.
He’s scrawled his name across a dizzying amount of forms today, and he sits for a moment considering his signature. It looks like a bit of controlled chaos - the strong and legible “G” and “L” are followed by smaller letters that are really just glorified scribbles - and it’s such a curious thing, his name.
There’s his surname, which is used so often it might as well be his given one. It means different things on the lips of different people; it carries different meanings depending even on the time of day. Donovan - no, Sally, she prefers Sally when not at the Yard - says it with a kind of affection when they’re off-duty, even if they’re discussing Sherlock. She doesn’t understand Lestrade’s soft spot for the man - and, to be fair, neither does Lestrade - and has never been able to hide her disdain.
Lestrade knows that she means well, though; she looks out for him. She’s aware that at some point during the last year the dynamic shifted between her boss and Sherlock, though she can’t pin it down any more than Lestrade can, and has tried to warn him off multiple times.
He’ll always let you down.
Par for the course, Lestrade decides, and moves to get his jacket. He knows when to call it a night, and ten minutes contemplating a name (and his own to boot) is one of those times.
But his tired musings don’t stop there, and drift, as they always do, to Sherlock. Sherlock, who uses his surname as a title during the day and as a name later on, when it’s just the two of them. Sherlock, who wields it like a whip at the crime scenes - “It’s a wonder, Lestrade, that you even manage to find the brainpower to dress yourself in the mornings, much less hold down a job.” - and handles it softly at night - “You should sleep, Lestrade; you’re little good to anyone like this.”
There’s also “Detective Inspector,” which has a hint of respect when coming from his people and is mocking when it comes from Sherlock. There are his initials, used when marking paperwork or in Sherlock’s hasty texts. They are formal when he uses them and almost intimate when used by the detective.
And then there’s “Greg,” which no one’s called him since the day his mother passed away. Sally used it once, at pub night, but it must’ve sounded as foreign and strange to her as it did Lestrade because she never did it again.
It’s some days later that he hears his name used by Sherlock for the first time. They’re standing in the detective’s living room, and the man’s hair is wild from repeatedly running his fingers through it. Lestrade knows he looks no better, having caught a glimpse of himself earlier in a darkened window. They’re going over the particulars of a case, which Sherlock had been rather gleeful about earlier in the day - “It’s clever, Lestrade, really clever; puts the Stinson case from last year to shame.” - but right now it’s causing Lestrade nothing but frustration.
“Look, Sherlock,” he says in exasperation, “either you give me a straight answer, or -”
“Or what?” Sherlock snaps back. “You’ll leave? How original. And what good would that do you? You case will remain unsolved.”
“My people are more than capable -”
“If they were ‘more than capable,’ you wouldn’t be here right now.”
Lestrade holds up his hands, as much to calm himself as Sherlock. “Look, I’m just trying to speed things along and I thought you might appreciate the work. If not, I have better things to do than stand here and listen to you insult my team.”
He reaches for the files, gathering all the paperwork into the appropriate folders. Sherlock lets out a dramatic breath and flops down onto the sofa.
"Then leave, Greg," he says, waving a hand at Lestrade. "But did you really think I asked you here to go over a case I worked out the answer to hours ago?"
"Well, I can't believe that you'd want me around otherwise," Lestrade mutters irritably. "Thought I was an idiot, like everyone else. You've said so, often enough."
"Oh, you are," Sherlock says. "But you are hardly 'everyone else.'"
“What am I, then?” Lestrade snaps before he can stop himself, and it surprises him because that hadn’t been what he’d meant to say at all. Sherlock turns his head and regards him solemnly for a few moments.
“Does it matter?” he says finally.
“Yeah. Yeah, it does, a bit,” Lestrade says, and rakes a shaking hand through his hair. Jesus, but he’s not good with this stuff to begin with, and now he feels ready to about crawl out of his skin in frustration. He can’t make any sort of sense of his life right now - everything is in contradiction, and the more he thinks about it the more it weighs on him, tugging him first one way and then the other, until he feels ready to about split in two. He already is a bundle of nerves as it is, though he buries it well, but add into that the pile of paradoxes that is Sherlock Holmes...
Sherlock, who has spent the occasional night in his bed since that first one last winter, though it’s never been more than that.
Sherlock, who is at once eighty-seven and eighteen.
Sherlock, who is a man of contradictions.
“You’re...tolerable,” Sherlock decides finally. “More so than the others, at any rate.”
Lestrade massages the back of his neck, realizing that he needs to amend his recent realization. Names are curious, yes, but they are also inadequate, and especially so where Sherlock is concerned. Titles, labels, definitions - they’re all ill-fitting and just wrong. Father-figure works well enough during the day, for him; he can accept it with relative ease. Minder fits as well; mentor, less so, but it works in a pinch. The dividing line between him and Sherlock is clear during the day, and that’s the only time when the labels make any sort of sense. Here, in the dark, when it’s only the two of them - nothing quite seems to fit. The names he tries to mentally apply to them refuse to stay - they’re always too little, never too much, and slip away from him like water through cupped hands, as though they were never meant to be there in the first place.
And then he realizes that it’s the names that are wrong. How does one pin a label on the worry he feels when he catches sight of the too-thin figure; when he sees shocking bone poking out from the open collar and blood pooled under tired eyes? How does one put a name to the small ball of warmth that settles in his chest on the nights when he looks up from his paperwork to see Sherlock casually standing in the doorway?
Paternal concern isn’t a phrase he can hide behind for very long, especially not with the number of times Sherlock has spent the night and the hesitant half-touches (brushing shoulders; bumping elbows) they trade in his office when the lights are low and the air strangely still.
They haven’t needed names thus far, and Lestrade’s not sure why he feels they need them now. Actions have always served them better. Fingertips, feather-light, on the back of the neck and firm hands that land on bony shoulders convey more than sentences neither of them would ever be able to string together anyway. They could struggle for years for words that can, just as easily, be conveyed in the clasp of a hand.
And the words wouldn’t fit, anyway.
“All right, take me through it again,” Lestrade says eventually, realizing that his silence has stretched into uncomfortable lengths, though Sherlock doesn’t seem to have noticed. Lestrade spreads the files back out on the table and hands the crime scene photographs to the detective. “From the top.”
----
It would figure that Sherlock Holmes would be the type of man to have a relative with a nasty habit of kidnapping people.
Lestrade doesn’t know why it didn’t occur to him sooner that the man would come from a family as eccentric as he is; a family made up of people who find that things done the normal way - the easy way - aren’t worth doing at all.
Conversations, for instance, aren’t worth having unless you can make a show of it.
And, looking back on it later, Lestrade has to admit that Mycroft Holmes puts on a hell of a show.
Lestrade gives the elder Holmes’ men the slip three times before they are finally able to nab him, and Mycroft is so impressed that he does nothing more than offer his congratulations, which baffles Lestrade more than frightens him because at the time he has no idea who the strange man in the immaculate suit even is, let alone why he’s congratulating him.
He can guess at one of those things, however.
“I think I met your brother the other day,” Lestrade tells Sherlock the next time they see one another. It’s raining, and they’re standing over a woman’s body.
“Oh?” Sherlock says, wholly disinterested. “What makes you think that?”
“He kidnapped me, said he was your arch-enemy, and then invited me to Christmas dinner.”
Sherlock’s face darkens and he spares Lestrade half a glance, which is more than he normally gets when there’s an interesting murder on.
“His name is Mycroft,” Sherlock says shortly.
“Sherlock and Mycroft,” Lestrade muses. “Your mother must really have had it in for you two.”
“Mmm,” Sherlock says distractedly. “You should have heard what she named the cat.”
----
Lestrade wears glasses now - for reading purposes only, but it’s a defeat all the same; one more remnant of youth chipped away by the encroaching twilight. He keeps them at home and squints his way through the workday, because it’s the last bit of defiance he can show middle age.
Sherlock is vicious in his jibes - because he knows, of course he does - but occasionally he’ll take pity on the DI.
“The third child was illegitimate,” he tells Lestrade one evening in his office.
“Oh? How d’you figure?” Lestrade asks absently, mind on his paperwork.
“You could tell by - no, signature goes there, Lestrade,” he says impatiently, jabbing at a spot further down on the page with an elegant finger. “Honestly.”
“Ah. Right.” Lestrade scrawls his name. “Thanks.”
Sherlock huffs and launches back into his story, gesticulating madly, and his eyesight may be poor but Lestrade could have sworn that he caught the faint shadow of a small smile on the detective’s lips.
----
Lestrade tends not to make it much further than the sofa these days, and so it’s a pleasant surprise when he wakes one morning to find that he’d actually made it to his bed the night before. The unpleasant surprise comes when he looks at the clock and realizes that he’s only minutes away from his alarm, which comes at an ungodly enough hour as it is. It feels as though he’s slept one hour, not four, and he sighs.
The sun is just starting to light the horizon by the time he’s showered and dressed, and he makes his way to the kitchen for coffee. He’s running short on time today - caught himself staring senselessly at the wall during his shower and lost a good ten minutes in blank contemplation of it - but he won’t be any good to his people (or anyone for that matter) without his usual early dose of caffeine.
It shouldn’t surprise him, really, to find Sherlock in his kitchen.
After a moment of careful thought, he decides that it isn’t the fact that Sherlock is in his flat that’s surprising. It’s more the fact that Sherlock has made coffee (enough for the both of them) and is leaning casually against the counter, book in one hand and mug in the other, looking entirely at ease.
“Lestrade,” he greets without looking up. Lestrade recovers from his surprise relatively quickly and makes for the coffee pot.
“Have you been here long?”
“Mmm. A few hours. I required your kitchen.” Sherlock sets aside his book and tucks his free hand in his pocket.
The kitchen looks good with him in it, Lestrade decides as he pours his first mug of coffee; looks right.
“I’ve got to be off in about five minutes. Help yourself to anything in the fridge; Lord knows you need it.” He wonders for a moment whether the coffee is actually part of Sherlock’s experiment, and then decides that he simply doesn’t care.
The room is small, and he has to reach around Sherlock in order to grab the milk sitting out on the counter. He touches the detective’s upper arm and mutters, “Excuse me,” and doesn’t get much further than that, because when he turns his head Sherlock is right there and their eyes have locked and he is done for.
Sherlock’s eyes flick to Lestrade’s lips for the briefest of moments before snapping back up, locking him in place. And then he leans in.
It’s little more than a caress, velvet lips brushing against dry ones; just a whisper of a touch that’s over before Lestrade’s brain can catch up with his body. The only thing he registers is the unexpected softness of Sherlock’s lips, so wildly different from the rest of the man. He is fire and fury, never content to do anything halfway or even gently, brusque and frenzied in everything he touches and does. But the kiss is gentle, as if Sherlock was handling something delicate.
It’s over before it really even started, and Lestrade’s hand closes on the milk as they break apart. He steps around the detective to add it to his mug while Sherlock returns to his book and they pass Lestrade’s final few minutes at home in silence, leaning against the counter, shoulders pressed together.
“Right, should be off,” Lestrade says eventually. “Can you manage?”
“I know how to use the front door, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“Don’t blow up the kitchen while I’m gone - or any room, for that matter,” Lestrade orders, and gives Sherlock’s too-thin arm a gentle squeeze as he leaves the room. “And for the love of God, eat something.”
----
Part Three