"No, I told you-" Jo ran a brush through her hair as she turned to face her husband. "I can't get them today. I've got that meeting this afternoon."
"What meeting?" The frazzled DI asked, struggling to put on his shirt. "We're wrapping up a big case today, I don't if-" Greg trailed off and relented at the vaguely irritated glare his wife was giving him. "Alright. Alright! I'll get them. Donovan can manage-" He stopped and looked down at his shirt.
Somewhere along the way, he'd missed a space, and buttoned the whole thing up lopsided as a result. "Bloody fu-" Two tornadoes and a furry hurricane tore into the parents' bedroom, cutting off his expletive.
"Lacey! Laaacey!" One dark-haired little girl shrieked, tumbling over and sprawling out across the carpet. The Lestrades' massive, fluffy retriever pounced, and lovingly licked jam from her messy face. "Lacey, nooo!" She shrieked again through a storm of giggles.
Greg and Jo exchanged jaded smiles. As far as they were concerned, if their nana dog, Lacey, wanted to help clean up their wild ragamuffin before school - let her!
"Charlie, where's Jack?" Greg asked the youngest boy - though Charlie was preoccupied with wearing his schoolbag like a turtle shell, and crawling across the bedroom floor as slowly as possible. "Jack, come and get your brother and sister!" Greg called out, fighting to get his buttons undone all over again.
Jo stepped over their daughter, and dog to push his hands out of the way. "You know if you slowed down a bit, things might go more smoothly." She didn't look at him as she spoke, but Greg felt a hint of shame all the same.
"Thank you," he murmured, kissing her gently by way of an apology. He'd have been lost without her, and they both knew it. But there was no time to express it - he was already late. "I've gotta run." He kissed Jo again, and grabbed his jacket. "Charlie, Sophie - behave for your mother today."
Their eldest, Jack, slipped between him and the wall to round up his siblings, and the family pet - "Here Lacey! C'mon, girl!" - as Greg hurried out of the room.
The day passed in a blur at Scotland Yard. If he ate lunch at any point, he didn't remember it. It had gotten lost in the half dozen conference calls, meetings with this team, and a scheduled-postponed-rescheduled press junket where reporters he didn't like badgered him with questions he couldn't legally give answers to. It was a hectic, frustrating day - he didn't even get a chance to return Jo's phone calls, or check his voicemail.
Getting the chance to dash out of his office and go pick up his kids from school was an actual relief.
"Charlie, for god's sake, stop biting your sister! Jack, could you just- no, it'll be fine. Sophie, sweetheart, you come sit up front with Daddy, alright?" The three Lestrade children squealed and yowled as they arranged themselves accordingly - Jack, finding his way into the backseat via the door, like a sensible lad, and Sophie, by crawling over the armrest in the middle, and face-planting into the passenger seat. All three did manage to get their seatbelts on properly - and as far as Greg was concerned, that was good enough.
They hurried home, and Greg tried desperately not to count the number of times he felt his mobile vibrate in his pocket.
"Jack," he asked suddenly. "How old are you?"
Greg's eldest son stuck his tongue out as his dad grinned boyishly at him through the rearview mirror. "Thirteen!" He answered proudly.
"My god, really? I thought Charlie was older than you." Sophie started laughing and Charlie puffed out his chest. Jack pouted. "How would you like to babysit your sister and brother for an hour or so?" Greg continued. "Just until Mum gets home?"
"Will you pay me?"
Greg snorted. Is that what kids were learning in school these days? "If you keep Charlie from burning the house down, and you make sure Sophie starts her homework- ("Daddy, no!") -then yes."
"How much?" Jack asked, as they rounded the corner of their street.
"Ten quid."
"Thirty!"
Greg glanced over his shoulder to give his entrepreneurial son a 'don't even think it' glare. "Twenty."
"Deal!" Jack conceded, grinning from ear to ear. He looked so much like his mother when he smiled that Greg couldn't even begin to feel swindled about paying his own kid to look after the other two children. Luckily, he didn't have time to dwell on it - they'd arrived. He threw the car into park quickly and stepped out, herding his family towards the front door.
To his surprise (and Jack's disappointment), Jo was waiting for them. The kids sprinted into the house, but Greg didn't have time to stop. "What happened to your meeting?" He asked, pulling his phone out of his pocket. The top seven missed calls were all Yarders - the team, Forensics, even Gregson? Though what he could possibly want, other than to make a snide comment about Lestrade's earlier interaction with the press, Greg didn't know.
"I've got to go back to the office," he explained, backpedalling towards his car. He only hesitated when he noticed the unhappy expression on his wife's face. "What's wrong?"
She opened her mouth to answer- and Greg's phone buzzed again. The dial lit up with DS Donovan's name; Greg quickly mashed the call button. "What is it?" Jo covered her face with her hand, as she so often did when she was annoyed with him. "Sorry," Greg mouthed, even though she wasn't looking.
But Sally's news wasn't good. To be fair - urgent calls from the Homicide and Serious Crime Command were never actually a good thing, especially for someone on the receiving end.
He looked up. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, I've got to go," he called out to Jo. "I'll call you if I can't make supper." He was back in his car, and driving away before she could even protest.
Some days he honestly considered flipping the siren - flashing those bloody bright blues and twos at the city traffic - to clear a path, and tear back to the office. Too much of his time was wasted waiting for someone to pull up, or clear the road, or whatever it was that caused so much back-up. He never would, of course. The penalty for abuse of a squad car (even an unmarked one, like his BMW) was relegation to traffic - fitting, but too fucking miserable to ever be worth it.
Thank Christ he had his own parking space.
Once back inside the building, he took the stairs two by two - and from then until well into the evening, he didn't get a chance to sit, or take a step back, or even catch his breath again. Only after quite a lot of running, catching an escaped suspect, and a trip to the ER because some stupidly foolish consulting brat didn't know when to hang back, did he actually stop, pick up his phone, and call his wife.
She was right about him needed to slow down. he knew that. But until all the bloody criminals in London got the same memo, there wasn't much he could do about it.
He pulled dog fur off his jacked - god, he loved that mutt - as the phone rang, but for whatever reason, she didn't answer. It was late, and he suspected she was probably putting the kids to bed - reading Sophie and Charlie a story, yelling at Jack to put away his bloody computer game. Greg sighed. He was exactly where he needed to be - at Sherlock's bedside - but he couldn't help wishing as he rubbed his eyes that he was back there, kissing his kids good night.
Literal days passed before he made it home again. There had been a fairly obvious complication with Sherlock's presence in the hospital, given the high levels of cocaine in his system, but the whole incident somehow seemed to sort itself out without Greg having to legally acknowledge that there had been an issue. There was no doubt in Greg's mind that Sherlock's brother, Mycroft, was involved, but again - for the sake of his own morals, and the law - he didn't question it.
He dropped his car keys, mobile, and wallet on a table by the door, trudged into the family room while whistling for his darling dog, and collapsed face down on the couch. Police work - if the soul-crushing crimes didn't kill you, the exhaustion most definitely would. He'd have been happy to pass out for a week, but he heard Jo's voice call out from the kitchen.
"Greg?"
He groaned. "Yeah. 'M back." He struggled to roll over as she walked out to meet him. "I'm so sorry," he mumbled, rubbing his face with both hands.
She didn't say anything. Jo stood behind the couch and looked down at him, almost impassively.
"I am... really, really sorry," Greg amended, peering up at her through his fingers. "I mean it." Jo looked away. Greg winced.
He sat up slowly, draping his arms over the back of the sofa to keep himself upright. "Where are the kids?"
"In their rooms. Greg..."
He hung his head. "I know, I can't keep doing this. I've gotta be at home more. But this was just such a big case- it's over now, though. It's over, and I promise I won't run off like that again. That was a one-off, Jo." He looked up at her imploringly, even though he was too tired to really lift his head from the cushions. "Only time with you, and the kids, and my dog from my now on. I swear it."
Jo closed her eyes - and that same unhappy expression washed over her face. Greg's stomach flip-flopped.
"What is it? Jo, honey- I really am sorry."
"Lacey was hit by a car," she answered quietly, clearly still very upset. "We had to put her down."
After everything he'd been through in the last few days, even the air on his face felt numb and distant. He was exhausted, he was cold, and he was indifferent to everything around him. But in that one, brief moment - Greg felt his heart shatter.