Four words Greg Lestrade never wants to hear again: "Sherlock Holmes is dead."
When Donovan told him, he stared at her, numb, unable to take it in. Sherlock. Dead. Suicide. It just didn't make any sense. (How could it make sense? How could it be true?)
Afterwards, at the funeral, it still didn't sink in. Still didn't feel real. He could understand the words alright, their meaning. (Sherlock Holmes - an arrogant, infuriating consulting detective who was always amazing and a great man even if not necessarily a good one. (And Greg counted him a friend too.) Is - present tense, current state. Dead - no longer alive. Gone. Body stiff and cold, no heartbeat, no breathing. Oh Greg understood the words alright.)
It took the grief left on John Watson's face for him to believe it, and though he tried to rationalise, knew that he wasn't to blame, he couldn't help feeling guilty. (If he hadn't gone to arrest him. . .)
In time, he came to accept it, to adjust to a new-Sherlockless reality. But adjustment didn't come easy, and it took a very long time to stop automatically picking up the phone to call a dead man to solve a murder case.
Five words Greg Lestrade plans to savour for the rest of his life: "Those things will kill you."
He thought it was only an auditory hallucination, a figment of his over-worked imagination. (Or a product of Anderson's theories at last. They were bound to get to him someday.) That voice belonged to a man two years dead, who'd killed himself by jumping off a hospital roof and crashing into the pavement.
Surely it was an hallucination.
Of course, it wasn't. Not this time. (And that one time had been in a pub two years earlier when he was drowning his sorrows.) The arrogant sod himself stepped out of the shadows of the car park, thinner than before, seeming almost tired but still wearing that damned coat.
Greg couldn't help the tears burning his eyes as he wrapped his arms around the familiar form, needing to feel the solid body and assure himself that it wasn't a ghost. Though he should have known that no ghost could sweep in all of a sudden like that.
(Almost lost him again, of course. Came so close to hearing those four words once more. It just goes to show miracles do happen sometimes. And they transform great men into good ones.)