The Measure of Goodness, 2/? [Sherlock, Lie to Me]
Title: The Measure of Goodness, ch. 2 - Too Little, Too Late
Fandom: BBC Sherlock, Lie to Me
Rating: R
Pairings: Eventual John/Sherlock, implied one-sided Moriarty/Moran.
Contents: Violence, references to and depictions of suicide
Summary: "Let me be clear. I understand very little, least of all the people closest to me." - Cal Lightman
Moriarty was a diabolically elegant puzzle, but Sebastian Moran is a maddening and contradictory enigma. Not even Mycroft Holmes has any idea of who Moran really is or what he truly wants-or just how far he will go to carry out Moriarty’s final orders.
Then, during the investigation of a bizarre and brutal murder, Sherlock crosses paths with another unconventional genius who may be able to help him get to the truth about Moran. Unfortunately, Cal Lightman also holds the key to another truth, and for once in his life Sherlock Holmes finds there are some things he would give anything not to know.
Notes: Even though this is a crossover with “Lie to Me,” detailed knowledge of that fandom won't be necessary. I simply could not pass up the idea of Sherlock Holmes squaring off against Cal Lightman. Also, many, many thanks to aishuu, incandescens, and mei. This would not be possible without your help and support.
It had been a long day, even though it was barely past six and Greg had been at home sprawled out on his sofa since... five? It was only in the past few minutes that his thoughts had finally and blessedly slowed down to the point where the crack that staggered across the ceiling was completely and utterly fascinating.
Greg really didn’t want to start thinking again. Not just yet. Because once he started thinking, he knew he wouldn’t be able to stop.
Should probably take off the tie, though. And the jacket.
He didn’t move. Not even when he pointed out to himself that the whiskey he’d been panting for since nine fucking ack emma was waiting patiently for him in the kitchen.
It had even brought friends.
You’ll have to take the suit in to get it pressed if you lie here like this for much longer, he tried telling himself. The fabric had rucked up beneath his back when he had collapsed an hour ago, but it was too much bother to do anything about it.
So what if the suit got wrinkled? He had plenty of others that were still in cleaner bags, all ready for him to wear to work on Mon-
Shit.
There it was, and he’d blundered straight into it. He groaned and sat up, pulling his hands down his face. He let out a chuff of laughter when his palms didn’t rasp over the stubble that had grown in over the past week because he couldn’t be arsed to shave more often that that these days. Of course he had wanted to look all clean and competent and professional when he went in to talk with the big boys that morning. The Deputy Commissioner and the Commissioner. And himself. Just the three of them, having a nice cozy chat together over the smoldering ruins of his career.
Greg Lestrade had his pride, he did, and that morning he had decided there was no way in hell he was going to look as low as he truly felt when he went in to hear the inevitable news that his six weeks of unpaid suspension was turning into something a bit more permanent.
Somehow, he had managed not to see too many people from his division when he arrived at the Yard that morning. He did catch a glimpse of Anderson from a distance, but the other man had looked away sharply and skittered for the nearest door the instant he and Greg locked eyes.
Well, what else did he expect? More than what he got, apparently, given how Anderson’s disappearance hit like a punch to the gut. He couldn’t even muster a laugh over the fact that (judging by the screams) Anderson had just fled into the ladies’ room.
There were plenty of other people he recognized, but only a few he had ever worked with directly. There were too many startled looks and quickly averted glances for his liking, but even without that there was a tension in the air that seemed... off. He saw it in the stiffness of people’s backs, or in the furtive over-the-shoulder looks that punctuated their conversations. It was present even before people had spotted him.
Something was already very, very wrong and his being there was just one more splash of gasoline on a fire that had started well before he arrived.
He had almost made it to the elevators when Arthur Dimmock spotted him. Rather than turning away or quickly finding an elsewhere to be, Dimmock left a conversation while the other person was still mid-sentence and hurried straight over to Greg without hesitation.
“It’s good to see you again, sir,” he said, horribly earnest about the ‘sir’ even though they were equal in rank (for now). “I mean... I hope it goes well in there. I mean that.”
Christ, he looked so young. Greg hadn’t been that young when he was five years old.
At least Dimmock seemed to have got off unscathed from his own association with Sherlock Holmes. That had to count for something, right?
Dimmock checked around discreetly, mirroring half of the other paranoid bastards in the lobby, even though he hadn’t hesitated when coming up to Greg.
“I just wanted to tell you that I never thought Mister Holmes was a fraud, sir. Never.”
Greg closed his eyes for a moment, biting his lips against what he really wanted to say.
“Thanks for that,” he managed before Dimmock could ask him how he was doing, and Greg hated how defeated he already sounded. Maybe what Dimmock had said would have meant more if he hadn’t been worried about eavesdroppers. Greg clapped him on the shoulder and kept on to the elevators. “Take care, right?”
He wasn’t sure if he was relieved or not that Donovan was nowhere to be seen. He wondered if she knew what was happening today, and if so, what she thought about it all. When he paused right before calling the elevator and looked back over his shoulder, he almost believed it when he told himself he wasn’t looking for anyone in particular.
At eight thirty, he was seated outside the Commissioner’s office. At ten minutes to nine, the admin crisply informed him that the Commissioner and Deputy Commissioner were ready to see him.
Commissioner Knox stood just inside the door, imperturbable as Jeeves himself, his hands lightly folded in front of him. The newspaper cartoons always depicted him as grossly fat and coarse-featured, but that captured nothing of the size and primitive solidity of the man. Knox had his own gravitational pull, and it had nothing to do with his bulk.
Further back in the room, Deputy Commissioner Williamson-who was lean and elegant in a way that suggested the kind of knife that could slip between your ribs and right back out before you knew what had happened-slouched against Knox’s desk, not bothering to hide his feral grin as he studied Greg.
Greg had rarely dealt directly with either of the two, and it had never been with both at once like this. One of them was the son of a dock worker and had never made it to university, the other had a Crufts-worthy pedigree and a Masters from the London School of Economics, and if you tried to guess which was which just by looking, you’d get it wrong every time. Once upon a time, back when velociraptors infested Hyde Park, they had worked together for over a decade as Inspector and Sergeant.
He’d heard all the horror stories. There would be nothing left of him but a stain on the carpet by the time they were done.
“Please have a seat, Detective Inspector,” Knox rumbled, inclining his massive head towards a long wooden table that was probably older than the Yard itself. It had been laid end-to-end with case files. Greg didn’t have to look at the labels to know they were ones Sherlock had consulted on.
For a moment, he saw Sherlock standing at the head of the table, sneering down at the files before turning to look at the three men in that room with the cutting smirk that said he was about to amaze them all. And amaze them he would, rattling off detail and explanation without pausing for breath, never slowing down, but rather picking up speed and animation as his audience went more and more slack-jawed in wonder. They would be stupid, Sherlock would say, to come to any other conclusions besides the ones he had drawn for them.
Greg wouldn’t be able to do even half of that, even though he had been there when Sherlock had unraveled everything the first time and made it all look so bloody simple. All he would be able to do, he knew, was fail his friend one last time. He hated everyone in the room for that, himself included.
He imagined Sherlock telling him not to be an idiot. This was more comforting than it should have been.
“I’m afraid we have a very long day in front of us, Lestrade. Have you eaten? No? I’ll have Amanda send out for some breakfast. I think this calls for something nicer than we can get from the cafeteria.” Knox excused himself as he stepped out to speak to his admin. The floor shook as he walked past. “Amanda, would you be so kind as to...”
In retrospect, Greg should have realized then that the day was not going to go anything like he had assumed.
At quarter past four that afternoon, he stumbled out of the Commissioner’s office. His ears were buzzing and he wasn’t sure anymore which direction gravity was supposed to go in. He headed straight for the gents (the regular gents, not the cushy private one he’d been offered the use of a few moments ago) and promptly threw up the remains of his very expensive catered breakfast and lunch.
They had given him his job back.
No demotion, no censure, and no question that he would be given his full six weeks worth of back pay.
Just like that.
He stood on wobbly legs with both hands braced against the cold tile of the wall, and he tried to catch his breath. He was afraid if he didn’t he would either throw up again or collapse in helpless, hysterical laughter.
Case after case after case had been declared clean by the investigators. Even the ones where Sherlock had bollocksed up the original chain of evidence past repair, because Greg and his team had gone back and built those cases right back up on solid and unassailable evidence once they knew what to look for. The investigators had even gone through a number of high-profile cases he’d worked on his own (which was really fucking insulting, if you asked him) and they all checked out. After only a month and a half, Commissioner Knox had declared that spending the kind of time and resources they had been on going through Sherlock’s cases was nothing but a waste. A team of twelve investigators was now down to one poor bastard who would make sure due diligence was done and all the i’s dotted and t’s crossed before there was any kind of public announcement, but there was no urgency as it was plain they would find nothing actionable. There was even considerable evidence that Moriarty-whoever he was-was real. Real enough that MI5 (and very likely 6 as well) had firmly taken over any investigation that had anything to do with the man.
“I suppose none of this surprises you, does it, Detective Inspector?” Knox asked with seeming innocence. The broad face was as unreadable as ever, and Knox’s muddy hazel eyes seemed unfocused, but Greg knew intense scrutiny when he felt it.
“Not really.” It was only mostly true, so he kept his eyes on the table as he answered. He hadn’t actually believed Sherlock was a fraud, but believing someone was a fraud and wondering if maybe someone could have been weren’t quite the same thing. Right?
Knox seemed satisfied enough by his answer. Then he and Williamson spent the rest of the day dragging Greg through the seven problematic cases that were left.
By ‘problematic,’ Williamson explained cheerfully, they meant that the people involved in the cases-or more to the point, their defense attorneys-were poised to raise holy hell with the press and in the courts if the cases were not shown to be as clean as the Blessed Virgin’s knickers. Some had already started in on the appeals process.
“I would make sure to memorize every detail of these cases if I were you, Lestrade. You’ll be called back into court more than once over this,” Knox warned him, but all Greg could do was nod dumbly in reply. It would probably be years before it was all over. He was starting to feel like he’d just gone five rounds with a champion prizefighter and had god knew how many more to go.
Round six was the matter of the ‘upset’ surrounding the Bruhl kidnapping. Knox had hemmed and hawed and spoken in vague generalities and plausible deniabilities until Williamson finally took pity on them all.
“Chief Superintendent Garrick’s taking ‘early retirement’ as of the end of this week, like it or not, and believe me, he don’t-not one bit. There’ll be blowback in the press,” he growled. “And speaking of the press, we got wind that something else tied to the Holmes mess is going to explode tomorrow.”
“Except for The Sun, one would imagine,” Knox said with a very genteel sort of malice.
There was nothing genteel about Williamson’s cackle. “Ah... No surprise there, right? They’ve been licking their wounds a bit, with this, that, and the other thing. That rag’s only good for one thing, and that’s Page Three,” he said with the requisite salacious grin. “You got to have seen it, though, Lestrade-telly, papers, web. The whole lot of ‘em, right? Every other day you got someone else going on on about how Holmes helped them and how he couldn’t be a fraud, no way, no how. Most of ‘em sound like crackpots, if you ask me, but when it’s people like the chairman of the board of Shad Sanderson, well...” He shook his head, chuckling, but his eyes had gone sharp.
“Actually, I’ve been avoiding the news recently,” Greg told them. Until recently, when money for petrol finally started to run low, he had been avoiding London as well. It had done wonders for his sanity, all told. Or maybe his recent self-isolation had finally cracked him completely, because none of this seemed real.
“Ah, yes. I see. I should also inform you there has been some, ah, discreet political pressure to put many of these cases back to bed as quietly as possible,” Knox said.
Ah, Christ. Greg knew exactly what-or rather, who-that meant. Talk about too little, too late.
“Monday will be your official first day back,” Knox continued, and then he paused just a little too long. “I suggest you use the time between now and then to think about the matter of your team, hm? Some restructuring within the division will probably called for, given the circumstances.”
Restructuring? He knew Anderson was still around, but...
“What about-”
Knox cut him off so smoothly that Greg felt like the one who had been interrupting rather than the other way around.
“Serious Crimes will report directly to Deputy Commissioner Williamson until we find a suitable replacement for Garrick.”
Williamson smiled in a way that could draw blood at twenty paces. No wonder everyone downstairs had been so spooked.
“As for the matter of your team, I believe I told you to give it the weekend, Lestrade. There will be time for such decisions later,” Knox said, and it was clear there was to be no more discussion on the matter.
After that, it was all over except the HR paperwork and two semi-sincere handshakes. And, of course, the vomiting.
What a fucking waste, Greg had thought as he staggered from the gents. He thought much the same thing two hours later, back in the privacy of his own flat.
Sherlock’s reputation had been hauled through the muck, jumped on, and torn to bits. God knew what else had happened that had driven him to jump off that roof, but now it was all being fixed. It was being patched together and polished up, and a year or two down the line it would be presented to the public with a fucking bow on top, and it was all too late.
At least they hadn’t had the gall to promote him in the bargain, as Knox had hinted they might. That would have sent him well and truly over the edge.
He sat on the edge of the couch, face still in his hands, and it came to him that if the press was going to ‘explode,’ as Deputy Commissioner Williamson so nicely put it, he owed John a heads-up. Yeah, that would be a fun call...
The last time he had spoken to John, it hadn’t exactly gone well. He felt a familiar twist of anger at the memory-couldn’t John see that he had tried to warn Sherlock of what was coming, that he had tried to help-but it was soon overpowered by an equally familiar twist of guilt and the realization that John was right, that maybe he hadn’t done enough, and if he’d done more, then...
He slapped his hands down to his legs and he shook his head in an attempt to knock those thoughts off their tracks. They never went anywhere he wanted to go. He was not about to add John to the list of people he had failed. The list was too long as it was, and...
Right. Enough of that, now.
Greg pulled out his mobile and selected John’s number before he could overthink things more than he already had. The call went straight to voicemail and a ‘mailbox full’ message. He then took a deep breath and fired off a text asking John to call him.
No response.
Twenty minutes later, still nothing. He fixed himself that drink.
After an hour, he fixed another drink and sent a series of text messages before he could think better of it.
Dont care what you think of me
Avoid news tomorrow
No details
Sorry
No response.
Two hours and at least two drinks later, he figured what the hell, and went to pull up John’s blog. He wondered if there would be any posts about the shift in public opinion, or maybe a post about how Sherlock’s so-called ‘friends’ had been a fat lot of good at the end (yeah, those last couple of drinks had been a bad idea).
It took him a moment to remember the URL once he finally stopped looking for a bookmark that was on his work computer rather than his piece-of-shit home computer. He mistyped or misremembered the address on the first go-round, or must have, because he got the hosting site’s ‘not found’ page. He missed it on the second try as well, and after completely botching an attempt to find it via search engine, he said ‘fuck it’ and stumbled off to bed because he’d clearly had too damned much to drink and couldn’t type straight to save his life.
Or maybe he’d had too damned little to drink, because his sleep was roiled by dreams that kept him from sinking into true unconsciousness. Most of the dreams were the kind of semi-realistic nonsense that faded away upon waking, but there was one that he would never entirely forget. It and its cousins had visited him too often over the years for that.
Once that particular dream started, he knew he was dreaming, but that knowledge didn’t change a damned thing. He was up on a dingy, dismal rooftop, one that looked just like the roof of the council block where he had grown up. The rooftop was also the span of a bridge, and even now he heard the rush of water and the crunch of great chunks of ice just below him. Over the past several weeks, it had also become the roof of St. Barts. He had no idea what that place looked like, but he knew it was the hospital with the sirens wailing below at the same time it was the bridge with its ice and the block with its cigarette butts and graffiti.
A gaunt young man stood in a gap in the chain-link fencing that ran along the edge of the roof. His back was to Greg, but the dark, matted hair and the sharpness of spine and shoulder blade beneath the foul, sweat-stained vest marked him as Sherlock-Sherlock as Greg had first known him, sleeping rough and strung out more often than he was sober.
Sherlock swayed where he stood, or maybe it was the roof that pitched and yawed as Greg ran (but too slow, too late, because that’s the way it always was in a dream, that’s the way it always was) to the man he thought of as his little brother.
It was his fault that Sherlock was standing there, but now... now Greg would be there in time.
He called out to Sherlock, but the words were wrong. The name was wrong. All of it was wrong. It wasn’t what he meant, he hadn’t known...
Sherlock turned.
Sherlock fell.
He slipped on the ice-slick concrete. No. Greg startled him, and that was what sent him over the edge. No. He jumped.
It was all of it, none of it. It didn’t matter. He turned, and he fell, and Greg was too late. He reached for Sherlock even as the familiar gray eyes shifted to an even more familiar brown. Greg nearly had his wrist, but the gap in the chain-link closed and his hand grasped nothing but metal. Sherlock was gone. Gone off the edge. Gone into the ice.
Gone.
The shock threw him not into waking, but into a rapidly shifting spiral of dreams. Sometimes he was on his way to a crime scene. Sometimes, it was Donovan calling him from god knew where, and he needed to get to her but he couldn’t hear what she was saying. There were other people calling him too, people he couldn’t or wouldn’t recognize. Whatever it was, whatever they needed, he was always too late, too slow, too stubborn, over and over and over again until his brain finally stopped pawing through the garbage and allowed him to fall into a deep, unthinking sleep.
He woke up far too early the next morning to the sound of his mobile ringing, the beginnings of a throbbing headache, and the realization that he had fallen asleep in his best suit. He hadn’t even taken off his shoes.
He didn’t even have the presence of mind to check who was calling before answering.
“Inspector Lestrade?” It was a woman’s voice, elderly, close to tears. It took him a few seconds to place it.
He hissed in pain-shouldn’t have sat up so fast. “Mrs. Hudson? What is it? What’s wrong?”
“I know it’s horribly early, but it’s Doctor Watson.” She paused, and there was a sniffle. “He moved out a while back, just after... I’d told him that Sherlock’s brother had paid his rent for the next year, but then he just left without telling me! He left most of his things behind, I haven’t heard from him in nearly three weeks, and then yesterday his sister phoned and said she’d been leaving messages but he wasn’t returning her calls, and she was so worried, and now he’s...”
There was a soft rustling, like she had put the phone against her shoulder while she collected herself. His heart was hammering so fast he was choking on it.
“Mrs. Hudson? Mrs. Hudson!”
Greg forced himself to breathe evenly. So John hadn’t checked in with anyone for a while. That didn’t mean anything had happened.
Bollocks. You don’t believe that.
The last time he’d seen John (and John had dully told him to just fuck off, hadn’t he done enough already?) the man had looked hollowed-out. There had been little left of him beyond the military posture and brittle expression, and what was left wasn’t anything he could bear to look at.
He shouldn’t have turned away. Yeah, he’d had his own wounds to lick. The man he had allowed himself to think of as a little brother had just killed himself (and he should have been able to do something to stop it, there had to have been something, he should have known...), his career was coming down in flames around him, and dozens of old scars had been ripped open again. It wasn’t right and it wasn’t good, but when John had looked at him with that mix of emptiness and anger and blame, with the anger rising wildfire-fast, the only thing he could do was turn on his heel and walk away before either of them could make things even worse than they already were.
Yeah, the rational part of him told him that as bad as things were for him, whatever John was going through was had to be a hundred times worse. Of course, he hadn’t been exactly listening to the rational part of himself back then.
“Mrs. Hudson, you still with me?” The hangover was still there, but it didn’t register. Not now.
There was another rustle of fabric, and then a quiet ‘sorry about that, dear’ that sounded almost collected. “Yes. Yes. I can’t help worrying-you know how it is with those boys.”
She used the plural, even though it was all too singular now. Maybe not even that. He shouldn’t have waited for her to call. He shouldn’t have waited so long to call John. He should have known to call.
“He even took down his blog, can you believe it? I hadn’t checked it in weeks, not after he locked down comments and stopped posting, but then one day it was just gone.”
He hadn’t mistyped it, then. Fuck.
There was another pause, and he could imagine her steeling herself. “And this morning...” Her voice broke. “Can you please come over?”
“I’ll get there as fast as I can,” he stammered. He had no idea what he could do when he did get there, but there had to be something. Even though it was probably far too late.
“Thank you.” Her relief sounded close to laughter even though there was nothing at all to laugh about.
Chapter Three - Ghosts in the Gaps
Fandom: BBC Sherlock, Lie to Me
Rating: R
Pairings: Eventual John/Sherlock, implied one-sided Moriarty/Moran.
Contents: Violence, references to and depictions of suicide
Summary: "Let me be clear. I understand very little, least of all the people closest to me." - Cal Lightman
Moriarty was a diabolically elegant puzzle, but Sebastian Moran is a maddening and contradictory enigma. Not even Mycroft Holmes has any idea of who Moran really is or what he truly wants-or just how far he will go to carry out Moriarty’s final orders.
Then, during the investigation of a bizarre and brutal murder, Sherlock crosses paths with another unconventional genius who may be able to help him get to the truth about Moran. Unfortunately, Cal Lightman also holds the key to another truth, and for once in his life Sherlock Holmes finds there are some things he would give anything not to know.
Notes: Even though this is a crossover with “Lie to Me,” detailed knowledge of that fandom won't be necessary. I simply could not pass up the idea of Sherlock Holmes squaring off against Cal Lightman. Also, many, many thanks to aishuu, incandescens, and mei. This would not be possible without your help and support.
It had been a long day, even though it was barely past six and Greg had been at home sprawled out on his sofa since... five? It was only in the past few minutes that his thoughts had finally and blessedly slowed down to the point where the crack that staggered across the ceiling was completely and utterly fascinating.
Greg really didn’t want to start thinking again. Not just yet. Because once he started thinking, he knew he wouldn’t be able to stop.
Should probably take off the tie, though. And the jacket.
He didn’t move. Not even when he pointed out to himself that the whiskey he’d been panting for since nine fucking ack emma was waiting patiently for him in the kitchen.
It had even brought friends.
You’ll have to take the suit in to get it pressed if you lie here like this for much longer, he tried telling himself. The fabric had rucked up beneath his back when he had collapsed an hour ago, but it was too much bother to do anything about it.
So what if the suit got wrinkled? He had plenty of others that were still in cleaner bags, all ready for him to wear to work on Mon-
Shit.
There it was, and he’d blundered straight into it. He groaned and sat up, pulling his hands down his face. He let out a chuff of laughter when his palms didn’t rasp over the stubble that had grown in over the past week because he couldn’t be arsed to shave more often that that these days. Of course he had wanted to look all clean and competent and professional when he went in to talk with the big boys that morning. The Deputy Commissioner and the Commissioner. And himself. Just the three of them, having a nice cozy chat together over the smoldering ruins of his career.
Greg Lestrade had his pride, he did, and that morning he had decided there was no way in hell he was going to look as low as he truly felt when he went in to hear the inevitable news that his six weeks of unpaid suspension was turning into something a bit more permanent.
Somehow, he had managed not to see too many people from his division when he arrived at the Yard that morning. He did catch a glimpse of Anderson from a distance, but the other man had looked away sharply and skittered for the nearest door the instant he and Greg locked eyes.
Well, what else did he expect? More than what he got, apparently, given how Anderson’s disappearance hit like a punch to the gut. He couldn’t even muster a laugh over the fact that (judging by the screams) Anderson had just fled into the ladies’ room.
There were plenty of other people he recognized, but only a few he had ever worked with directly. There were too many startled looks and quickly averted glances for his liking, but even without that there was a tension in the air that seemed... off. He saw it in the stiffness of people’s backs, or in the furtive over-the-shoulder looks that punctuated their conversations. It was present even before people had spotted him.
Something was already very, very wrong and his being there was just one more splash of gasoline on a fire that had started well before he arrived.
He had almost made it to the elevators when Arthur Dimmock spotted him. Rather than turning away or quickly finding an elsewhere to be, Dimmock left a conversation while the other person was still mid-sentence and hurried straight over to Greg without hesitation.
“It’s good to see you again, sir,” he said, horribly earnest about the ‘sir’ even though they were equal in rank (for now). “I mean... I hope it goes well in there. I mean that.”
Christ, he looked so young. Greg hadn’t been that young when he was five years old.
At least Dimmock seemed to have got off unscathed from his own association with Sherlock Holmes. That had to count for something, right?
Dimmock checked around discreetly, mirroring half of the other paranoid bastards in the lobby, even though he hadn’t hesitated when coming up to Greg.
“I just wanted to tell you that I never thought Mister Holmes was a fraud, sir. Never.”
Greg closed his eyes for a moment, biting his lips against what he really wanted to say.
“Thanks for that,” he managed before Dimmock could ask him how he was doing, and Greg hated how defeated he already sounded. Maybe what Dimmock had said would have meant more if he hadn’t been worried about eavesdroppers. Greg clapped him on the shoulder and kept on to the elevators. “Take care, right?”
He wasn’t sure if he was relieved or not that Donovan was nowhere to be seen. He wondered if she knew what was happening today, and if so, what she thought about it all. When he paused right before calling the elevator and looked back over his shoulder, he almost believed it when he told himself he wasn’t looking for anyone in particular.
At eight thirty, he was seated outside the Commissioner’s office. At ten minutes to nine, the admin crisply informed him that the Commissioner and Deputy Commissioner were ready to see him.
Commissioner Knox stood just inside the door, imperturbable as Jeeves himself, his hands lightly folded in front of him. The newspaper cartoons always depicted him as grossly fat and coarse-featured, but that captured nothing of the size and primitive solidity of the man. Knox had his own gravitational pull, and it had nothing to do with his bulk.
Further back in the room, Deputy Commissioner Williamson-who was lean and elegant in a way that suggested the kind of knife that could slip between your ribs and right back out before you knew what had happened-slouched against Knox’s desk, not bothering to hide his feral grin as he studied Greg.
Greg had rarely dealt directly with either of the two, and it had never been with both at once like this. One of them was the son of a dock worker and had never made it to university, the other had a Crufts-worthy pedigree and a Masters from the London School of Economics, and if you tried to guess which was which just by looking, you’d get it wrong every time. Once upon a time, back when velociraptors infested Hyde Park, they had worked together for over a decade as Inspector and Sergeant.
He’d heard all the horror stories. There would be nothing left of him but a stain on the carpet by the time they were done.
“Please have a seat, Detective Inspector,” Knox rumbled, inclining his massive head towards a long wooden table that was probably older than the Yard itself. It had been laid end-to-end with case files. Greg didn’t have to look at the labels to know they were ones Sherlock had consulted on.
For a moment, he saw Sherlock standing at the head of the table, sneering down at the files before turning to look at the three men in that room with the cutting smirk that said he was about to amaze them all. And amaze them he would, rattling off detail and explanation without pausing for breath, never slowing down, but rather picking up speed and animation as his audience went more and more slack-jawed in wonder. They would be stupid, Sherlock would say, to come to any other conclusions besides the ones he had drawn for them.
Greg wouldn’t be able to do even half of that, even though he had been there when Sherlock had unraveled everything the first time and made it all look so bloody simple. All he would be able to do, he knew, was fail his friend one last time. He hated everyone in the room for that, himself included.
He imagined Sherlock telling him not to be an idiot. This was more comforting than it should have been.
“I’m afraid we have a very long day in front of us, Lestrade. Have you eaten? No? I’ll have Amanda send out for some breakfast. I think this calls for something nicer than we can get from the cafeteria.” Knox excused himself as he stepped out to speak to his admin. The floor shook as he walked past. “Amanda, would you be so kind as to...”
In retrospect, Greg should have realized then that the day was not going to go anything like he had assumed.
At quarter past four that afternoon, he stumbled out of the Commissioner’s office. His ears were buzzing and he wasn’t sure anymore which direction gravity was supposed to go in. He headed straight for the gents (the regular gents, not the cushy private one he’d been offered the use of a few moments ago) and promptly threw up the remains of his very expensive catered breakfast and lunch.
They had given him his job back.
No demotion, no censure, and no question that he would be given his full six weeks worth of back pay.
Just like that.
He stood on wobbly legs with both hands braced against the cold tile of the wall, and he tried to catch his breath. He was afraid if he didn’t he would either throw up again or collapse in helpless, hysterical laughter.
Case after case after case had been declared clean by the investigators. Even the ones where Sherlock had bollocksed up the original chain of evidence past repair, because Greg and his team had gone back and built those cases right back up on solid and unassailable evidence once they knew what to look for. The investigators had even gone through a number of high-profile cases he’d worked on his own (which was really fucking insulting, if you asked him) and they all checked out. After only a month and a half, Commissioner Knox had declared that spending the kind of time and resources they had been on going through Sherlock’s cases was nothing but a waste. A team of twelve investigators was now down to one poor bastard who would make sure due diligence was done and all the i’s dotted and t’s crossed before there was any kind of public announcement, but there was no urgency as it was plain they would find nothing actionable. There was even considerable evidence that Moriarty-whoever he was-was real. Real enough that MI5 (and very likely 6 as well) had firmly taken over any investigation that had anything to do with the man.
“I suppose none of this surprises you, does it, Detective Inspector?” Knox asked with seeming innocence. The broad face was as unreadable as ever, and Knox’s muddy hazel eyes seemed unfocused, but Greg knew intense scrutiny when he felt it.
“Not really.” It was only mostly true, so he kept his eyes on the table as he answered. He hadn’t actually believed Sherlock was a fraud, but believing someone was a fraud and wondering if maybe someone could have been weren’t quite the same thing. Right?
Knox seemed satisfied enough by his answer. Then he and Williamson spent the rest of the day dragging Greg through the seven problematic cases that were left.
By ‘problematic,’ Williamson explained cheerfully, they meant that the people involved in the cases-or more to the point, their defense attorneys-were poised to raise holy hell with the press and in the courts if the cases were not shown to be as clean as the Blessed Virgin’s knickers. Some had already started in on the appeals process.
“I would make sure to memorize every detail of these cases if I were you, Lestrade. You’ll be called back into court more than once over this,” Knox warned him, but all Greg could do was nod dumbly in reply. It would probably be years before it was all over. He was starting to feel like he’d just gone five rounds with a champion prizefighter and had god knew how many more to go.
Round six was the matter of the ‘upset’ surrounding the Bruhl kidnapping. Knox had hemmed and hawed and spoken in vague generalities and plausible deniabilities until Williamson finally took pity on them all.
“Chief Superintendent Garrick’s taking ‘early retirement’ as of the end of this week, like it or not, and believe me, he don’t-not one bit. There’ll be blowback in the press,” he growled. “And speaking of the press, we got wind that something else tied to the Holmes mess is going to explode tomorrow.”
“Except for The Sun, one would imagine,” Knox said with a very genteel sort of malice.
There was nothing genteel about Williamson’s cackle. “Ah... No surprise there, right? They’ve been licking their wounds a bit, with this, that, and the other thing. That rag’s only good for one thing, and that’s Page Three,” he said with the requisite salacious grin. “You got to have seen it, though, Lestrade-telly, papers, web. The whole lot of ‘em, right? Every other day you got someone else going on on about how Holmes helped them and how he couldn’t be a fraud, no way, no how. Most of ‘em sound like crackpots, if you ask me, but when it’s people like the chairman of the board of Shad Sanderson, well...” He shook his head, chuckling, but his eyes had gone sharp.
“Actually, I’ve been avoiding the news recently,” Greg told them. Until recently, when money for petrol finally started to run low, he had been avoiding London as well. It had done wonders for his sanity, all told. Or maybe his recent self-isolation had finally cracked him completely, because none of this seemed real.
“Ah, yes. I see. I should also inform you there has been some, ah, discreet political pressure to put many of these cases back to bed as quietly as possible,” Knox said.
Ah, Christ. Greg knew exactly what-or rather, who-that meant. Talk about too little, too late.
“Monday will be your official first day back,” Knox continued, and then he paused just a little too long. “I suggest you use the time between now and then to think about the matter of your team, hm? Some restructuring within the division will probably called for, given the circumstances.”
Restructuring? He knew Anderson was still around, but...
“What about-”
Knox cut him off so smoothly that Greg felt like the one who had been interrupting rather than the other way around.
“Serious Crimes will report directly to Deputy Commissioner Williamson until we find a suitable replacement for Garrick.”
Williamson smiled in a way that could draw blood at twenty paces. No wonder everyone downstairs had been so spooked.
“As for the matter of your team, I believe I told you to give it the weekend, Lestrade. There will be time for such decisions later,” Knox said, and it was clear there was to be no more discussion on the matter.
After that, it was all over except the HR paperwork and two semi-sincere handshakes. And, of course, the vomiting.
What a fucking waste, Greg had thought as he staggered from the gents. He thought much the same thing two hours later, back in the privacy of his own flat.
Sherlock’s reputation had been hauled through the muck, jumped on, and torn to bits. God knew what else had happened that had driven him to jump off that roof, but now it was all being fixed. It was being patched together and polished up, and a year or two down the line it would be presented to the public with a fucking bow on top, and it was all too late.
At least they hadn’t had the gall to promote him in the bargain, as Knox had hinted they might. That would have sent him well and truly over the edge.
He sat on the edge of the couch, face still in his hands, and it came to him that if the press was going to ‘explode,’ as Deputy Commissioner Williamson so nicely put it, he owed John a heads-up. Yeah, that would be a fun call...
The last time he had spoken to John, it hadn’t exactly gone well. He felt a familiar twist of anger at the memory-couldn’t John see that he had tried to warn Sherlock of what was coming, that he had tried to help-but it was soon overpowered by an equally familiar twist of guilt and the realization that John was right, that maybe he hadn’t done enough, and if he’d done more, then...
He slapped his hands down to his legs and he shook his head in an attempt to knock those thoughts off their tracks. They never went anywhere he wanted to go. He was not about to add John to the list of people he had failed. The list was too long as it was, and...
Right. Enough of that, now.
Greg pulled out his mobile and selected John’s number before he could overthink things more than he already had. The call went straight to voicemail and a ‘mailbox full’ message. He then took a deep breath and fired off a text asking John to call him.
No response.
Twenty minutes later, still nothing. He fixed himself that drink.
After an hour, he fixed another drink and sent a series of text messages before he could think better of it.
Dont care what you think of me
Avoid news tomorrow
No details
Sorry
No response.
Two hours and at least two drinks later, he figured what the hell, and went to pull up John’s blog. He wondered if there would be any posts about the shift in public opinion, or maybe a post about how Sherlock’s so-called ‘friends’ had been a fat lot of good at the end (yeah, those last couple of drinks had been a bad idea).
It took him a moment to remember the URL once he finally stopped looking for a bookmark that was on his work computer rather than his piece-of-shit home computer. He mistyped or misremembered the address on the first go-round, or must have, because he got the hosting site’s ‘not found’ page. He missed it on the second try as well, and after completely botching an attempt to find it via search engine, he said ‘fuck it’ and stumbled off to bed because he’d clearly had too damned much to drink and couldn’t type straight to save his life.
Or maybe he’d had too damned little to drink, because his sleep was roiled by dreams that kept him from sinking into true unconsciousness. Most of the dreams were the kind of semi-realistic nonsense that faded away upon waking, but there was one that he would never entirely forget. It and its cousins had visited him too often over the years for that.
Once that particular dream started, he knew he was dreaming, but that knowledge didn’t change a damned thing. He was up on a dingy, dismal rooftop, one that looked just like the roof of the council block where he had grown up. The rooftop was also the span of a bridge, and even now he heard the rush of water and the crunch of great chunks of ice just below him. Over the past several weeks, it had also become the roof of St. Barts. He had no idea what that place looked like, but he knew it was the hospital with the sirens wailing below at the same time it was the bridge with its ice and the block with its cigarette butts and graffiti.
A gaunt young man stood in a gap in the chain-link fencing that ran along the edge of the roof. His back was to Greg, but the dark, matted hair and the sharpness of spine and shoulder blade beneath the foul, sweat-stained vest marked him as Sherlock-Sherlock as Greg had first known him, sleeping rough and strung out more often than he was sober.
Sherlock swayed where he stood, or maybe it was the roof that pitched and yawed as Greg ran (but too slow, too late, because that’s the way it always was in a dream, that’s the way it always was) to the man he thought of as his little brother.
It was his fault that Sherlock was standing there, but now... now Greg would be there in time.
He called out to Sherlock, but the words were wrong. The name was wrong. All of it was wrong. It wasn’t what he meant, he hadn’t known...
Sherlock turned.
Sherlock fell.
He slipped on the ice-slick concrete. No. Greg startled him, and that was what sent him over the edge. No. He jumped.
It was all of it, none of it. It didn’t matter. He turned, and he fell, and Greg was too late. He reached for Sherlock even as the familiar gray eyes shifted to an even more familiar brown. Greg nearly had his wrist, but the gap in the chain-link closed and his hand grasped nothing but metal. Sherlock was gone. Gone off the edge. Gone into the ice.
Gone.
The shock threw him not into waking, but into a rapidly shifting spiral of dreams. Sometimes he was on his way to a crime scene. Sometimes, it was Donovan calling him from god knew where, and he needed to get to her but he couldn’t hear what she was saying. There were other people calling him too, people he couldn’t or wouldn’t recognize. Whatever it was, whatever they needed, he was always too late, too slow, too stubborn, over and over and over again until his brain finally stopped pawing through the garbage and allowed him to fall into a deep, unthinking sleep.
He woke up far too early the next morning to the sound of his mobile ringing, the beginnings of a throbbing headache, and the realization that he had fallen asleep in his best suit. He hadn’t even taken off his shoes.
He didn’t even have the presence of mind to check who was calling before answering.
“Inspector Lestrade?” It was a woman’s voice, elderly, close to tears. It took him a few seconds to place it.
He hissed in pain-shouldn’t have sat up so fast. “Mrs. Hudson? What is it? What’s wrong?”
“I know it’s horribly early, but it’s Doctor Watson.” She paused, and there was a sniffle. “He moved out a while back, just after... I’d told him that Sherlock’s brother had paid his rent for the next year, but then he just left without telling me! He left most of his things behind, I haven’t heard from him in nearly three weeks, and then yesterday his sister phoned and said she’d been leaving messages but he wasn’t returning her calls, and she was so worried, and now he’s...”
There was a soft rustling, like she had put the phone against her shoulder while she collected herself. His heart was hammering so fast he was choking on it.
“Mrs. Hudson? Mrs. Hudson!”
Greg forced himself to breathe evenly. So John hadn’t checked in with anyone for a while. That didn’t mean anything had happened.
Bollocks. You don’t believe that.
The last time he’d seen John (and John had dully told him to just fuck off, hadn’t he done enough already?) the man had looked hollowed-out. There had been little left of him beyond the military posture and brittle expression, and what was left wasn’t anything he could bear to look at.
He shouldn’t have turned away. Yeah, he’d had his own wounds to lick. The man he had allowed himself to think of as a little brother had just killed himself (and he should have been able to do something to stop it, there had to have been something, he should have known...), his career was coming down in flames around him, and dozens of old scars had been ripped open again. It wasn’t right and it wasn’t good, but when John had looked at him with that mix of emptiness and anger and blame, with the anger rising wildfire-fast, the only thing he could do was turn on his heel and walk away before either of them could make things even worse than they already were.
Yeah, the rational part of him told him that as bad as things were for him, whatever John was going through was had to be a hundred times worse. Of course, he hadn’t been exactly listening to the rational part of himself back then.
“Mrs. Hudson, you still with me?” The hangover was still there, but it didn’t register. Not now.
There was another rustle of fabric, and then a quiet ‘sorry about that, dear’ that sounded almost collected. “Yes. Yes. I can’t help worrying-you know how it is with those boys.”
She used the plural, even though it was all too singular now. Maybe not even that. He shouldn’t have waited for her to call. He shouldn’t have waited so long to call John. He should have known to call.
“He even took down his blog, can you believe it? I hadn’t checked it in weeks, not after he locked down comments and stopped posting, but then one day it was just gone.”
He hadn’t mistyped it, then. Fuck.
There was another pause, and he could imagine her steeling herself. “And this morning...” Her voice broke. “Can you please come over?”
“I’ll get there as fast as I can,” he stammered. He had no idea what he could do when he did get there, but there had to be something. Even though it was probably far too late.
“Thank you.” Her relief sounded close to laughter even though there was nothing at all to laugh about.
Chapter Three - Ghosts in the Gaps