Original prompt: Sherlock/John with injured/ill/whatever-the-f**k-as-long-as-he's-in-the-hospital-but-doesn't-die-no-matter-how-close-he-gets!John and Totally-Not-Panicking!Sherlock with a heaping dose of good-friend-and/or-father-figure!Lestrade please!
/ / /
12:13 am
Gregory Lestrade recalls the last time he was in a hospital waiting room. His daughter—she was six-years-old at the time—had come down with appendicitis. It had all been a big fuss, very sudden, very chaotic. And he remembers sitting in the waiting room, on the phone with his ex-wife—she was still his wife at the time, and was out of town on another one of her business trips. She was shouting in his ear, berating him for this thing that could not possibly be his fault, and he tried to reassure her, just anything to stop the shouting, but the shouting didn't stop. It was nothing, though, compared to the waiting. Waiting to see if his little girl would come out all right—and she did, of course, but he had to wait before he knew that. He doesn't wish that waiting on anyone.
And yet, here he is, back in the room, back to the waiting. Albeit several years later and under entirely different circumstances. And honestly, Greg wishes Sherlock Holmes would shout, instead of what he is currently doing: pacing in circles around the waiting room, muttering things under his breath, and generally disturbing everyone around him.
"Stupid, stupid, stupid," he hears Sherlock hissing under his breath as he passes by. He is on what is probably nearly the hundredth lap of the waiting room. The other occupants, who sit rumpled and pale and worried in their seats, stare at the bizarre, mumbling man as he slinks past them. But Sherlock takes no notice of any them, of course. He is content to keep circling and hissing forever.
Perhaps, Greg thinks begrudgingly, someone should put a stop to it.
He clears his throat once Sherlock is about to pass by again, but of course that isn't enough to get his attention.
"Sherlock," he says, and the tall, imposing man stops but doesn't face him. Greg takes this as encouragement. "Why don't you sit down?"
"Why?" Jesus. How that man sharpens syllables into the deadliest weapons, he'd never know, but just that one word flung in just the right tone makes the hairs on the back of Greg's neck stand on end. Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on how you looked at it, he's gotten used to feeling unsettled by Sherlock, and isn't dissuaded.
"Well, for starters, you're bothering… everyone."
"So?" Another word-turned-dagger, but Greg won't give up yet.
"So, uh. Well." He is at a momentary loss, fumbling for some inspiration, then—ah, yes. He remembers something he hears John mutter to Sherlock every time he started acting like an arse in public. "I believe that is a bit… not good. As they say."
The effect is immediate. Sherlock slumps into the chair next to him, sliding all the way down so that his legs stuck out way too far. Greg decides to hold his tongue about that for now—he is just glad to see him off his feet.
"Maybe you should take your coat off. You're soaked through."
Sherlock responds by crossing his arms, drawing the coat tighter around him.
Greg rolls his eyes to the ceiling and takes a deep breath and keeps holding his tongue, right between his teeth until the sharpness overrides his irritation.
/ / /
1:22 am
Greg dozes without meaning to. It has been a long week, like every other week in recent (and, if he was being accurate, not-so-recent) memory. And this day. This has been a long day.
Though, he knows it has been infinitely longer, and worse, for Sherlock.
He wipes his bleary eyes and takes a peek at the consulting detective, who is wide awake, of course, and appears not to have budged an inch since he sat down.
"Any news? Anyone come out with an update?"
"They came twenty-seven minutes ago; John is in surgery, and will be, for the next couple of hours. In other words, no. No news. Just what they already bloody told us when we got here."
Greg catches the prickles in Sherlock's voice, but what surprises him is the soft underbelly of his words, quite like a startled porcupine. Oh, God, and now he's comparing Sherlock to cute little forest animals. What is happening to him? It's the sleep deprivation, he decides.
"Sherlock…"
"If you're about to tell me that everything is going to be fine, then you can save it. 'Fine' is irrelevant. 'Going to be' is irrelevant. 'Everything' is irrelevant, as long as John is at a hospital and he is not fine and he is lying on a table because he is having emergency surgery."
Forget daggers, forget goddamn forest animals—Sherlock's a machine gun. Or, more simply, a machine.
Greg takes a moment to recover from the onslaught, but he does, and then he says quietly, "I was going to ask, would you like me to get you something to eat?"
He sees Sherlock take one slow breath, in through the nose out through the mouth, but no signs of remorse show on his face. "Cafeteria's closed at this hour."
"Right. I meant from a vending machine."
"No."
"Okay."
It comes so softly, and after such a delay, that Greg suspects it is just the telly blaring in the corner, or else he nodded off again—but he swears he hears a tiny little whisper of a "thank you."
/ / /
2:28 am
Greg drinks his coffee on the way back to the waiting room.
He found a vending machine for it right outside the waiting room, but it was out of order, so he had to go on the hunt for another and then nearly got lost. He finally found a nurse who took pity on him, led him to the coffee, and then directed him back to where he needed to go.
He got a second cup for Sherlock, just in case, but he half expects the man to toss it in his face, what with the state that he's in—one reason to be grateful it's so lukewarm.
When he gets back to the waiting area, he sees Sherlock has his feet on the chair, knees drawn up, folded in half neatly without even wrinkling his coat.
"Hey. Got you some coffee," Greg says, holding out the cup intended for Sherlock. "Dunno how you take it, but I thought you—Sherlock?"
"What is it I don't want coffee just leave me alone," Sherlock spits at him, all in one go, without the decency of a pause or a breath. But Greg can tell something is amiss—very amiss.
"You're… Are you…" He doesn't want to have to finish the question, but Sherlock's stony silence leaves him no choice. "Crying?"
"My face is just wet."
"Your face. Is wet?"
It sounds preposterous, but it's true: his upturned collar and his drawn up knees and his matted hair covers all but the space around his eyes, which is suspiciously shiny. Sherlock, being Sherlock, picks up on Greg's doubt.
"Yes, it's not such a ridiculous idea, Detective Inspector. It was raining outside." Here is Sherlock, spewing out all the usual snarky words, but his tone doesn't match up. It's… shrill. "It was raining, and my face got wet, as did the rest of me. It's not quite the stretchyou're making it out to be."
"Sherlock…"
"You said it!" Yes, it's shrill, all right. It's positively screeching. "You're the one who said my coat was soaking wet! Well, I'll have you know, SO. IS. MY. FACE."
He holds his knees even tighter to his body, disappearing into his coat and himself. His hands grip the thin armrests of the chair and Greg can see his knuckles are white.
He sits down next to him, ponders it all with an odd calm. He sets both cups on the floor, careful to put them off to the side so they won't get kicked. He looks up, gives the room an apologetic look. The people don't gawk for long, thankfully—there's been enough nervous breakdowns and emotional outbursts in a place like this, anyway.
And then, with very little further deliberation, he puts his hand on Sherlock's.
It's a perfectly innocent gesture, but he can feel the effect it has immediately: Sherlock's whole body clenches for one moment, and Greg waits for the wrath, for him to jerk his hand away. But then he relaxes—more than relaxes, he unfolds and he unravels and he cries.
It's not sobbing, because that would be too much for a man like Sherlock Holmes—and Greg counts himself lucky for that, because the sight of a sobbing Sherlock would be too much for a man like Gregory Lestrade. But he cries, enough so that his face is wet and it is tears, blatant and honest and obviously tears, not rainwater.
He sits properly in the chair now, his feet on the ground and his back straight, still clutching the armrests.
"It's my fault. My fault that John…"
Once again, Greg thinks of his daughter, but from another time—a stray memory that presents itself so forcefully that for a moment, he can't shake it. It was from a few years after the appendicitis, around the time his wife became his ex-wife. It's my fault Mummy left,his daughter had said, and that broke his heart then and this breaks his heart now. "No, no, don't say that. Don't say that."
"If I hadn't taken him with me…"
"You didn't know the guy would be armed. You'd solved the case, you were just trying to catch him."
"Exactly. I'd solved the case, it was over. John didn't need to be there."
"John never needs to be there, though, does he?" Sherlock gives him a look, and Greg smiles ruefully. "Oh, you know what I mean. He doesn't need to be there, but you want him to be. Nothing wrong with that."
"There's something wrong with it when it gets him stabbed three times in the abdomen by a criminal."
"He wants to be there, too. You don't exactly have to drag him around."
"I should have been more careful. I shouldn't have let him…"
"Protect you?"
"I don't need protecting."
"Well, I'm sorry to say, Sherlock, there are people out there who are going to protect you, like it or not. Like John. And me, too. And much as each one of us—you, me, him—would like to think we can just plan for the others not to get hurt, it doesn't happen that way. You can't deduceaway bad luck."
"There's no such thing as bad luck."
"Then what do you call getting stuck in a hospital waiting room with you on a dark and stormy Friday night, then, huh?" Greg quips, and thankfully, amazingly, Sherlock smiles, but only briefly. He quickly sobers up.
"You coming… I appreciate it." He says it quietly, with his head ducked down.
"Oh, it's no trouble. I wanted to catch the guy as much as you did, and since you called me when you knew where he would be, I was on my way anyway…" It's at this moment Greg realizes his hand is still on Sherlock's, and he takes it off. Sherlock looks up, eyebrows raised just ever-so-slightly, for a moment a perfect portrait of vulnerability, and then looks away again, all coolness and gravity once more.
Greg finds a grin working onto his face that he hides by reaching down for his coffee cup and bringing it to his face. It's a bit insane, but—the little quirk of the eyebrows, the put-on toughness—maybe there's just something about this night that makes him nostalgic—oh, but it all reminds him terribly of his daughter. And that makes him grin.
/ / /
3:46 am
Sherlock sleeps this time and Greg stays awake. It surprises him, seeing Sherlock's eyes close and his face slacken, and he realizes (a bit unfairly, and he knows that) that it's the times Sherlock looks the most human that he is the most unsettling.
He sleeps so deeply that he doesn't even stir when the nurse comes to tell them John's out of surgery, that everything's going to be fine after all. Greg knows he should wake him immediately, knows that if Sherlock knew he'd delayed telling him such vital information for even a second that Sherlock would want to throttle him, and yet—
Look at him, sleeping so peacefully. It's unsettling, but it's endearing, too. Perhaps that is what's most unsettling of all.
Another memory comes to him then, one that spans over many years. His daughter, sleeping in the car or sleeping in too late. His wife-ex-wife always yelled her name, shook her, startled her awake. But Greg never had the heart to do it like that.
He leans forward, touches one of the hands now limp on the armrests, and says, softly but assuredly, reassuringly, "Sherlock."
/ / /