Disclaimer: I, much to my sadness, do not own any type of Sherlock apart from my books

and DVDs. Nor do I own Cicero or any of his works. The only Cicero I own is my car.

Virōrum est fortium toleranter dolōrem patī. (Cicero, On Pain)

John Watson

John Watson wasn't quite sure when he had first heard the words before. It was probably sometime in Afghanistan, sometime when he was administering to a patient, and said patient was being reassured by a fellow soldier. To be honest, it may even have been when he was shot himself. Though thinking about it, if someone had told him that, he would have punched them in the face for being so goddamn patronising.

But now, now he was here. Here. By himself, in The Flat without Sherlock, the words floated around his mind.

It is part of brave men to endure pain with patience.

Well right now he didn't feel brave, he didn't feel patience, he didn't really feel anything. Except pain. A pain that constricts your heart, feeling like a boulder is sitting in the pit of your stomach. The pain for everything that he had lost.

He believed, oh damn he believed in Sherlock Holmes. No man could be that much of an annoying, insufferable, know-it-all, clever, genius, amazing dick all the time without it being real. No-one.

His limp had returned; sitting in the chair, staring at the empty one across from him, John twirled the aluminium stick in his hand on the floor. It could make a hole in the floor for all he cared. A short, bitter laugh broke the silence at the thought of what Sherlock would say about the limp being back, and John looked surprised that the sound came from him. He didn't think he could ever laugh again, not that the sound he had made had been derived from any feeling of mirth. And bitter, pained laughing was better than breaking down into tears.

The clichés always said that time eases the pain of losing someone you love. He supposed that he would have to be patient; that the pain would ease. He would have to be a brave man, just a different type of brave to the way he had been before.

He just wasn't sure if he was brave enough to wait out this pain.

Mycroft Holmes

Mycroft Holmes had tried various places to distract his mind. The office, his flat in Pall Mall, the Diogenes Club. He had been loathe to leave London, but in the end he had thrown all his usual sensibilities to the wind, picked a station and boarded a train. Three hours later he was standing on a deserted Norfolk beach. The wind was trying to ruffle his hair, the sky was a depressing, bland grey, the sea itself looked even more ominous, and the surf crashed onto the beach. The weather was far too squally to put up his umbrella if it rained, but then, the umbrella was more a symbol of who he was. It just happened to be practical on occasion.

Virōrum est fortium toleranter dolōrem patī.

Mycroft was renowned for being a patient man. He would come up with means to thwart terrorist attacks that took months to put into place. And he would wait. Of course, occasionally one's younger brother had to go put a spanner in the works, try and impress a woman for the first time in his life, and destroy months of work in a matter of seconds, but that is what Sherlock does.

Was, did. What Sherlock was. What Sherlock did.

Mycroft Holmes does not externalise emotion, apart from mild exasperation at his little brother, and this, he thinks, is why he is here. Standing on some deserted beach that has taken three hours, and not a small amount of inconvenience, to get here. The sea is representing his emotions. And this is as much as Mycroft Holmes will ever demonstrate the pain his brother's death has caused.

Of course, Mycroft knows the truth. He is the British Government. There are very few details in life that Mycroft does not know. Sherlock had bided his time before approaching his older brother. Now all Mycroft can do is watch peoples' lives disintegrate. People, even he grudgingly admits, he has become sort of fond of.

He knows that patience, and time, will help restore normality. And in many ways, that is the hardest task of all. It hurts that his brother had to 'die', and when he initially heard the news, the pain had almost stopped him breathing. But he knows that Sherlock is out there. And Mycroft is powerless for once in his life to help the people that Sherlock so affected. Once the truth comes out, he will have to weather the storm of hurt, and be brave in the face of those who will have believed him to have betrayed them.

His pain may not be the same as John Watson's, or Mrs Hudson's, but still he has to endure the pain of his brother's loss with degrees of patience that have never been so difficult.

Greg Lestrade

Greg Lestrade knows that he owes a lot to Sherlock Holmes. Professionally at any rate. And that is not to detract from his achievements, because he is a good police officer. He didn't have Sherlock holding his hand (not that Sherlock would hold a person's hand) for every case in his career. And dammit, he viewed Sherlock as his friend. A frustrating, arrogant, headstrong, reckless, brilliant friend.

Anderson and Donovan have been studiously avoiding him as much as humanly possible; indeed, Lestrade has requested that he have Dimmock on as many cases as possible. This has caused some awkwardness, Dimmock is the same rank, though sometimes seems impossibly young, but Lestrade has, in general, had his own way.

It is the part of brave men to endure pain with patience

He would never claim to be brave, certainly never like John Watson, who is probably the bravest person he knows. But he saw that quote somewhere once, and now it goes round his head like a mantra. He'll meet a grieving relative and want to tell them it, just to show that he knows what it feels like. But he thinks, and rightly so, that it wouldn't go down so well; and more often than not he'd probably have at least one black eye for being patronising and insensitive.

While in many ways it doesn't help; it does. He knows that that is illogical, but he is patient. When it comes to emotion, he can do patient. His private life has been a whole mess of having to be patient.

Thing is, Sherlock was his friend, and Lestrade hadn't realised just how much of a friend Sherlock was until he went and jumped off bloody St Barts. Nor had he realised the guilt that pressed down on his ribcage for even doubting Sherlock for a nanosecond. He had seen the man in action, he knew he wasn't a fake, and yet had let that seed of doubt creep in. And the next thing he knew Sherlock had only gone and committed suicide.

He resisted the urge to punch the computer monitor. He cursed himself for not listening to his gut, letting himself be swayed by popular opinion. He could reason with himself that one more person standing by Sherlock would not have been enough to prevent the jump, but at the same time it might just have been. How many lives had been/will be destroyed because Sherlock had been removed from the game? How could he reconcile this with his own feelings of guilt?

This was a mixture of loss and guilt, and he wasn't sure just how brave, and how patient he could be this time.