The December 5th prompt, as assigned by Garonne:

Safe haven

We finished the pot of soup that night, something that we never did, for I normally cannot eat that much and Holmes usually chooses not to partake very much of it, that is, if he chooses to partake at all.

No sooner had Mrs. Hudson disappeared with the dishes, but then she ran up again, telling us that there was a frantic knocking at the front door. The nature of the knocking was such that Mrs. Hudson did not want to be the one to open the doors, for fear of what she would find, so Holmes and I moved to quickly, him leaping up and bounding down the stairs, I following as quickly as my cane would allow me to follow.

Holmes had flung the door open and stepped into the night before I got onto the first landing, and it was his shout that made me continue faster, and I am honestly not certain how my body was able to react to the situation that quickly. When I made if far enough in order to see who our visitor was, I could understand his shock, and it spurred me on to reach their side as quickly as I could.

Holmes was kneeling over a body, the man with his hands over his face, rocking back and forth, and he called for me to hurry. I saw blood from between the fingertips, and shouted for Mrs. Hudson, to grab my bag from my bedside. With some difficulty, I managed to get into a kneeling position next to the man, and gently speak to him, putting one of my hands on top of his. "Let me see your face."

With some reluctance, the man took his hand away, and I was astonished to see that it was Lestrade, his right eye covered in blood dripping into his silvering hair. He seemed conscious and at least somewhat lucid as Holmes attempted to speak with him.

Holmes looked at me before I nodded. "We need to get him upstairs."

My friend simply took a deep breath and picked the detective inspector up with such tenderness as I have never seen, and made his way slowly up the stairs. His movements may have been slow, but they were also deliberate and gentle so as not to cause the man any unnecessary pain. When he made it to the top of the stairs, he gently set the man down on the sofa, not even caring that his shirt was now soaked in blood.

The look on Holmes's face was one that I had never quite seen before. But there was no time to delay, and I stripped my jacket off as I made to kneel before the sofa, groaning involuntarily as my leg cried out in protest. I nearly lost my balance and would have if Holmes had not reached out and grabbed me under the arms to help steady me. I reached for the inspector again and was forced to peel his hands back again, so that I could look at his face.

"Lestrade, what happened?" Holmes had taken it upon himself to make sure that he remained conscious. "Are you all right?"

Lestrade was nodding softly, faintly, murmuring under his breath as though he had no idea what was going on. He wasn't nearly as lucid as we had previously thought. Holmes and I exchanged a look as I cleaned the blood away. There was little to be done. But I nodded for Holmes to continue speaking so that he would be able to at least keep Lestrade conscious throughout the dressing of whatever wound he had managed to incur.

Once I had cleaned the worst of the blood away, I was able to see a long gash in his face that traveled from his forehead through his left eye and down his cheek. A closer examination of the wound revealed that it must have been a knife that caused this, and that it had just barely scratched the surface of the eyeball. It was horrific to observe, since the entire eye had now gone red. But in many ways, Lestrade was very fortunate. It could have been a lot worse.

After my stitches were done, Holmes helped Lestrade to drink a bit of brandy. He had been lucid enough to insist that no, he had no desire for us to get him to a hospital; he would much prefer remaining here with us in Baker Street. We knew that we would be remaining with him for the rest of the night to make sure that there was no change for the worse.

After he'd choked down some brandy, he looked so exhausted that it made my heart wrench. He had a piece of cotton secured over his injured eye, and as of now, the bleeding seemed minimal. As we were all very aware, the night ahead of us was going to be very long, and if he was not able to regain his mental faculties at all by the morning…

It had taken us much longer than I'd realized to bandage the wounds and get him cleaned up. By the time we sat back, almost equally as exhausted, it was very late, the clock was nearly about to strike midnight. I coughed slightly, now that I'd had a moment to regain my breath.

"If you'd like, Holmes, why don't you go and get some rest. I'll stay with him."

Holmes shook his head vehemently. "No, Watson. I'll remain here with him. You go and rest."

We did not want to disturb him, now we'd finally gotten him to sleep. In the end, we both decided to let him lie, both of us sitting in our favorite chairs and stealing glances over at his body every now and again to convince ourselves that he was still breathing.

The night was very long, even though Lestrade appeared to be sleeping peacefully. By this time, he was a single man once again, for his wife had died a few years previous. His two children were grown and moved away so he had very little to go on. No family for us to contact and tell that he was narrowly escaping death at this very moment.

The next morning, we had both fallen asleep in our chairs, though Holmes was far more awake than I was, his supple form eternally ready for action. And once he realized that Lestrade had awoken, he was on his feet in an instant, at his side and speaking quietly with a glass of water in his hand.

I could hear Lestrade talking softly in response to whatever Holmes was asking. He kept his voice low to avoid causing the detective inspector any unnecessary discomfort. I reached around for my cane for a moment before I made it to their side.

The blood from his face had soaked through the bandage during the night and I took his bandage off and drew from the hot water that Mrs. Hudson had left shortly before any of us had awoken. Lestrade was quiet while I cleaned the new blood of his face, until I drew closer to his eye.

I paused before I reached his eye, suddenly aware of the fact that only his uninjured eye appeared to be moving. "Lestrade, can you see my cloth?" I asked, gently waving my cloth in front of the injured eye.

He squinted, unsure of what to say. His hesitation made me draw in my breath, though not in a manner that would be distracting to the injured detective inspector; I had been able to tell even before I asked him that his eye simply wasn't seeing anything.

"Never mind that," I said briskly, trying to make him feel at ease again. "How are you feeling?"

"Got quite the headache," he mumbled, trying to put a hand to where I was now bandaging the wound. "You can imagine."

I chuckled, tying off the bandage so that his face now appeared clean and protected. "I certainly can."

He shrugged, eyes closed. "You know me. I'm never bored."

"What happened last night, Lestrade?" Holmes asked, his tone gentle while still being coaxing. "You certainly did cause us a lot of concern."

Lestrade shook his head, still keeping his good eye closed. "No, no, nothing like that," he insisted. "It wasn't like that."

"Then what was it like?" asked Holmes.

Lestrade took a breath. "We'd been chasing a man down the lane and he suddenly stopped and hid around a corner. I was running after him with a constable because he'd been getting away with some stolen jewels. And he was hidden around that corner, and then just jumped out of nowhere when I rounded the corner. Knifed me in the face. Managed to fight him off, constable arrested him, and we got him shipped back to the Yard. I needed to go home because my head was aching. I thought it was just a surface wound."

He trailed off, grimacing again. After a moment, I said to him, "I'm so sorry, Lestrade, would you like something stronger than brandy for the pain?"

He shrugged, and opened his good eye. "Do you really think you have anything that could help?"

I smiled, and reached into my bag to find a vial of morphine. Holmes pretended not to see it, getting up and moving over to the window, but I sensed that it wasn't just to give Lestrade a sense of privacy.

I injected the morphine into Lestrade's system, and his eyes closed again. "If you two don't mind," he said, taking another deep breath, "I think that I'm going to take a bit of a rest. I need some sleep, try to recover my strength."

I nodded, struggling to my feet and allowing him a moment as Holmes looked pensively out the window at the relative safety of Baker Street.

Well, that was a lot darker than I intended…