TITLE: Say My Name
CHAPTER/TITLE: Chapter One/A Good Man
RATING: T (language, content)
A/N: Based on tumblr user diglestrade's prompt: "No but imagine Greg getting shot in front of Sherlock. Possibly Greg taking a bullet for him. And as he falls down, Sherlock would scream: 'GREG!'This is the story of how I broke my own heart."
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DISCLAIMER: I do not own Sherlock.
Chapter One: A Good Man
Greg's heart was hammering mercilessly against the inside of his chest. He could feel every pained and panicking punch, hear every piercing pound. Vaguely, he wondered if the genius consulting detective, yeah that one that could never remember his name, could hear it too. He wondered if Sherlock could take one solitary fleeting glance at the man and deduce the sheer terror that was strangling the vital organ. He tried, oh he tried, to keep the fear from his face. He was the bloody chief detective inspector, damn it. But Greg wasn't a high functioning sociopath and when the murderer lifted his gun at said self-professed sociopath, there was no masking the panic.
It had been a month, a bloody month, since Sherlock's dramatic return from the grave. A month since Greg had practically tackled the man into a hug in that parking garage.
One month.
Too soon for them to lose him a second time. Too soon for even the possibility of Sherlock slipping from their grasp all over again.
The murderer currently with his revolver aimed at the mad detective's heart had already taken nearly a dozen lives. Scotland Yard and Sherlock had been chasing the spree killer for almost an entire week. He was a brutal bastard, Greg often called him, muttering under his breath as he cleared yet another crime scene. It was these cold-hearted criminals that oftentimes reminded Lestrade of how much of a psychopath, even a sociopath, Sherlock really wasn't.
How could Greg look into the dead, empty eyes of this man and see any similarity to Sherlock? How could Lestrade stare for hours on end at the wall of photographs of the victims and imagine his friend doing something so sickening?
Sherlock Holmes may have been a lot of things – arrogant, arsehole, manipulative, pickpocket – but he certainly wasn't anything like this man. Like any of them.
Even Moriarty, who had compared himself to Sherlock, was the polar opposite of the man. Even if the rest of the world spent two years blind to the truth, even if others at the Yard couldn't see it, Greg always could. He never gave up on the younger man. Not when he first met him, well, found him, during a raid, high as a kite. Not when the drug addict had spent the entire ride in the back of the police car to the station telling the rookie all about the latest string of London murders, and who was responsible for them. Not when Donovan and Anderson, and then the entire city, where ready to string up the fake detective. No, Lestrade believed in Sherlock Holmes. Long before the social media mantra in fact.
He stood by his words spoken to John Watson all those years ago.
"Sherlock Holmes is a great man, and I think one day, if we're very, very lucky, he might even be a good one."
It was this good man, his friend, that was now staring into the mouth of a killer's gun. And it was for this same man, that Greg leapt forward, and in front of Sherlock.
He didn't hear the small explosion. He didn't even feel the bullet tear away at his skin.
All he felt, was Sherlock's arms, cradling him in what would have otherwise been a fairly graceless and painful fall. All he heard, was Sherlock's voice. And a name he never thought would pass the man's lips.
"Greg!"