Title: Two To Build, Two To Break
Author: Still Waters
Fandom: Sherlock (BBC)
Disclaimer: I do not own Sherlock. Just playing, with love and respect to those who brought these characters to life.
Summary: Lestrade knew what two words could do.
Written: 3/11/13 – 3/12/13
Notes: Apparently, this is what happens when I haven't written anything in a month, sit down while sleep-deprived after a frustrating night at work, have nothing planned for my birthday besides work and an upcoming consult for my next eye surgery, and tell myself to create something: I get a melancholy, descriptive, open-ended, kind of dark one-shot. I guess this was the story that needed to be told though, because it flowed out of nowhere. As always, I truly hope I did the characters justice. Thank you for reading and for your continued support. I cherish every response.
Lestrade's career was a decades-long proof of the infinite complexities inherent in two word sentences.
Where's [loved one's name]?
What happened?
Why him/her/us?
Too many repetitions a year, each one accompanied by tiny, individualized variations significant enough to make a common set of emotional responses – panic, grief, shock, rage – as incomprehensibly endless as the universe itself.
His responses were equally measured; a two word bookend. Sometimes Lestrade got lucky and his two words brought relief; visceral victory in a few joyous syllables.
He/she's safe.
He/she's fine.
It's over.
It was all too rare now - where panic and pre-emptive loss were blown away with the waiting loved ones' first released breath, joy at a future that still existed taking over - but it did happen.
More often than not, however, Lestrade's two word response could, at best, hope to bring the comfort of closure; at worst, to perpetuate the gnawing pain of uncertainty.
I'm sorry.
He/she's gone.
He/she's dead.
He/she's missing.
Lestrade had become intimately familiar with the power inherent in two words. Two words could build. Two words could break.
And today, like too many days before, he knew just what they'd do.
Lestrade shuffled uncomfortably at the morgue doors, stifling an all-too-real wince as the metaphorical plasters he'd applied to his own cracks pulled; waiting for the man England once again saw as brilliant and unbreakable to come down the corridor.
Sherlock burst through the hospital doors with his customary long-legged stride, trademark coat billowing behind him in an image of substantial presence. But Lestrade had the advantage of a DI's keen eyes and an unlikely friend's insight: one glance was all he needed for the coat's turned collar and flapping material to go from imposing and foreboding to that of a frightened cat arching its back and fluffing out its fur to ward off a threat.
And the information Lestrade had was the worst sort of threat.
"Where's John?" Sherlock demanded. Two words. No clever or condescending use of language. Just stripped down, laser-focused Sherlock Holmes, with barely concealed panic in his eyes. Eyes that consistently delighted in the morgue's intellectual offerings, but now stared at Lestrade instead, avoiding the doors under the pretense of deducing the answers he needed from the DI's open face.
Lestrade shook his head. "Not here." He paused, cleared his throat roughly, and added two more words; the core of his work. "I'm sorry."
Sherlock's eyes narrowed, a sound halfway between a growl and an insulted scoff caught in his throat as if he thought Lestrade actually had the audacity to offer him banal platitudes about souls and bodies being separate entities. But it was just for a moment, passing as quickly as it surged. Fear, self-doubt, and half a dozen other emotions Sherlock would never admit to may have slowed him down, but it was only a fraction of a second compared to how long those feelings muddled, or outright paused, others' reasoning abilities.
Lestrade had all too much experience with what came next; that moment when clarity resumed its hold. He forced himself to stand still and steady as Sherlock launched into a probing deductive scan, to absorb the flash of grief as realization hit mercurial eyes, and to say nothing. To pretend that Sherlock successfully covered it with factual neutrality.
"Something's here," Sherlock murmured, forgoing his usual disdainful, superior, 'you are all so obvious' tone for one muted by dozens of other thought processes, each of which centered on the fact that Lestrade wouldn't have met him at the morgue without reason. His gaze grew distant, eyes flicking back and forth as he stared through Lestrade, running through possible permutations: a captor John had killed, a message John had somehow ensured that he would receive….followed by the uncharacteristically secondary - yet inevitably likely - consideration that the morgue held part of John, not all of him, and that Lestrade's response was, therefore, a matter of semantics. Sherlock swallowed, heart racing in an otherwise placid chest as calculations of limbs and organs, blood loss and time, vital versus survivable, tore through his head. "Tell me," he demanded, eyes sharpening back to the present.
Sherlock, at his core, was a man of science; of facts, data, and distant, unencumbered observation. But Lestrade knew desperate, irrational hope when he saw it.
In any face.
The silence stretched for a full five seconds, each man regarding the other, before Sherlock broke it with a huff. "Come on," he spat impatiently, pushing through the morgue doors.
Lestrade followed.
Fifteen minutes later, he followed, rather than led, an exceedingly pale Sherlock back out to the corridor after suggesting that Sherlock's pacing and rapid-fire hypotheses were impeding Molly's progress. He watched Sherlock stalk the corridor and stood guard against passersby and readmittance to the morgue; listened to him ramble through the new information while pretending not to hear the occasional stutter in the deductive rush. When Sherlock finally came to a halt, gathering that aloof, genius mantle around him and straightening into his self-assured, minutiae-focused stance, Lestrade looked past the glaring cracks in the thin veneer, showed no visible acknowledgement of the raw grief mixed with stubbornly desperate hope in Sherlock's eyes, and let him have his protection; the illusion that his wall was opaque and solid as ever.
All while trying not to think about where he might now stand on the list of people who could sort of read Sherlock Holmes.
Sherlock waved a hand as if his deductions still hung in the air to be gathered and processed. "Find him."
"We will," Lestrade replied; assurance without the sentimentality of sounding assuring. "Mycroft's waiting," he tilted his head toward the exit.
Something flickered through Sherlock's eyes at those last two words and his fractional nod held both subtle gratitude and approval. He may not have always found Lestrade's first name worthy of remembrance, but he did know that Lestrade wasn't a man who gave his word lightly. And while Sherlock was regularly reminded of his deficiencies in interpreting subtle social cues, he bloody well recognized a promise when he heard one.
With a final nod and sweep of his coat, Sherlock turned on his heel and strode toward the exit doors without a single derisive word regarding Lestrade's initiative in arranging to have Mycroft and one of his ubiquitous black cars waiting on the other side.
Lestrade followed with a steadying breath, mentally preparing himself for the road ahead; a man with a promise to keep. And not just to Sherlock. He'd promised John; late one night in the corner of a darkened pub, years ago, after the raw hurt of Sherlock's return had faded into the comfort of new routines and second chances. Promised him that if John were ever to disappear or be killed, that Sherlock would never have to suffer through endless unanswered questions the way John had after Sherlock's faked suicide. That Sherlock wouldn't have to bury an empty coffin as John later found out he had done after Sherlock's jump.
And when Lestrade had brushed aside John's guilty grimace for asking something like that of him with a firmly sober "I promise", he had meant it.
Because Lestrade knew what two words could do.