Long Live the King (2/2)
Title: Long Live the King (2/2)
Author: hope_tang
Rating: PG
Spoiler Warning:The Reichenbach Fall
Warnings:
[(includes potential story spoilers; click to open)]
assumed major character death, discussion of violent crime, non-graphic violence and attempted murder(s), brief mention of off-screen harm to children
Summary: The seven or eight months After are hell. The seventeen months after that aren’t much better.
Disclaimer:Other than being a fan, I have nothing to do with Sherlock. I’m not even British…
Betas: As always, my gratitude goes to agent_bandit, powdered_opium, bluewillowtree, and dkwrkm for reading over this story multiple times. Any remaining mistakes are my own.
Author’s Note: This can be read independently, or as a sequel to Disjunctive Pieces.
PART I
~
Ten months After, they’re working a bad case: a serial child abductor-murderer who targets London’s thriving immigrant communities. When they question the third victim’s sobbing, terrified parents, he sees a look in Sally’s eyes that he doesn’t particularly like, but he knows it’s in his too.
It’s an unvoiced, unwelcomed thought:
If he were here…
(They still call each other ‘Sir’ and ‘Sergeant,’ but they slip up sometimes.)
Then again, if he were here, we’d all be yelling at him for being an insensitive arse.
Maybe.
Three weeks later, when the Detective Inspector and his Sergeant go to question Brian Morris in his sixth-story flat, all hell breaks loose. The man is nervous, but neither Greg nor Sally is prepared for the knife he brandishes at them. (So much for a soothing cup of tea.)
Their witness-abruptly-turned-suspect refuses to come quietly and backs his way onto the balcony. Greg tries his best to talk the man down as Sally calls for armed response (and some back-up damnit!) Both police officers keep themselves between their suspect and his front door. It’s over.
Except it’s not.
They all see the moment when Morris decides that death is better than life in prison. Sally lunges in and grabs him before he goes over the edge. She nearly follows him over herself before Greg grabs the back of her shirt and pulls all of them back from certain death.
In the struggle that follows, a blur of fists and brute strength and where is the bloody fucking knife, somewhere in that scuffle, a blade plunges deep into unprotected flesh. Neither of the officers involved notice until Morris is face down in the carpet, hands cuffed behind his back, and the patrol cars have arrived on scene. Then-
Sir, are you all right?
It’s not my bl- Goddamnit, call an ambulance!
(Dimmock’s team finds a drugged eight-year-old girl, bound and gagged, in the basement.
At nightfall, she would have been victim number six.)
After Morris is processed into custody and Dimmock practically shoves him out of the office, Greg goes to wait in a sterile, obnoxiously comforting room on the surgical ward.
He waits.
wait
wait
wait
It’s in the early hours of the morning that he manages to talk his way into the recovery ward. He is exhausted and if he sits, he’ll sleep, so he stands vigil. Greg waits to see his very groggy Sergeant come out of the anaesthetic before he leaves to go back to work.
It is odd to see Sean Pritchard, Detective Sergeant, in her place,
but she has been his protégé for nearly five years.
He is used to her presence by his side.
She will be all right. She will.
Sympathetic colleagues mean that, hidden resentment or not, only one person asks after Sally’s condition and spreads the news to the rest of the unit. The DCI lets Greg give both the investigative and case statements in one go before putting him on desk duty. There is no sense in letting a Sergeant-less DI wander about London unsupervised.
Later that day, Greg goes back to University College Hospital during normal visiting hours. A flash of his warrant card at the front desk yields the floor and room number he needs. He knows that she’s fine, but he needs to know.
All hospitals are the same in their focused frenzy, and he walks past doctors, patients, and visitors without paying them any attention. They are the blur of humanity that he works in and with, but today, he doesn’t have the energy to take note of them as individuals. Absorbed in his own thoughts, Greg stumbles to a halt at the sound of a familiar, yet unexpected voice, drifting out into the wide corridor.
“Do you know what he’d say if he were here?”
The question is dryly spoken, with a hint of resigned amusement, as if both speaker and listener are rehashing a long-running conversation. The reply is quiet, but steady.
“A sentimental idiot,” says Sally before she adds, “If he were feeling generous.”
“Right.” There’s a nervous squeak of a cane’s slip-stop against the floor. “The thing is, he’d be right. You-.”
There is another pause before her guest continues in a not-entirely steady voice, “I’ve lost more people in my life than I ever wanted to. So has Greg.”
The detective inspector in question finds himself rocking back on his heels, as if struck by a gut punch. He doesn’t talk about it. He still doesn’t think about it. He has dealt with it by dealing with the After, and nothing…and nothing else. It’s almost been a year, and he still can’t say the word ‘suicide’ without feeling the need to vomit. He steadies himself against the wall and forces himself not to go down the path into years of regrets and unfinished business.
Inside the hospital room, Sally’s visitor orders with all the sternness of a commanding officer, “Don’t add yourself to the tally. He needs his sergeant to watch his back.”
A second squeak of the cane is all the warning Greg has to pull himself together. When John Watson comes out of Sally’s hospital room and their eyes meet, they don’t need to say a word. They exchange a nod and Greg manages a quiet ‘thank you’ and this will never be brought up when they meet at the pub on game night to heckle the football match.
As he enters her temporarily private room, Greg thinks this may be the first time that John has spoken willingly to Sally since… since After. They’re all not dealing with it in the same ways.
He pauses at the foot of her bed.
She stares at him studying her.
He finally breaks the silence with, “I’ll spare you the lecture, Sergeant.”
She looks tired and listless. It’s probably the morphine drip and the nature of being a patient stuck in the hospital, but she looks fragile, and his Sergeant Donovan has never been frail-a pain-in-the-arse, bright, outspoken, spitfire of a police officer, yes, but never delicate.
“I’m not,” she says firmly, holding his gaze. “I’m not.”
He walks around to take the seat by her bedside and sighs. “I didn’t say you were, but that was still damn stupid.”
“He was going for you, Sir. I couldn’t let that happen.”
Throwing yourself into danger for me isn’t going to bring him back, or undo our choices, he wants to tell her, but instead, he swallows hard and says, “Next time, we’re both wearing vests when we question suspects. No arguments.”
“You won’t get any from me.”
He doesn’t stay long. She looks ready to fall asleep on him, even without the pharmaceutical aids, and he needs sleep himself. Before he leaves, he tells her to rest up and then adds:
“Donovan, I need my sergeant watching my back.”
She nods and replies, “Yes, Boss.”
~
“I’ll go with you,” volunteers Sean Pritchard immediately, pulling on his jacket. Greg needs to follow-up a lead in Soho, and SOP says he should take a DS with him. He still doesn’t know the younger man very well, and a chat in the car on the way over and back would go a long way towards filling that knowledge gap.
It’s another stabbing case, and frankly, Greg has his private doubts about whether or not they’ll be able to close this one. No one wants to talk to the Met about the victim and they don’t have many leads. Still, they have to try because the victim was someone’s son, regardless of his poor choices in life.
“Actually, Pritchard,” says Sally from behind the younger man, her focus on an open file in her hands, “could you go with Kapur, Beckett, and Jones to re-canvas the estates?”
The casual question is a distracted order, wrapped in brisk tones and built on the understanding that Sally Donovan is a police officer crossed at one’s own peril. Like the rest of her peers and the constables, Sean nods in acquiescence. “Sure, but who’s with the boss, then?”
It’s brief, but Greg catches a flicker of annoyance in the younger man’s eyes before it is smoothed away. He wonders if he imagined it, but… a part of him says no. There’s more to Sean than meets the eye. Whether that is for better or worse, even after nearly two years of working with him, Greg doesn’t know.
“Sorry, Boss,” says Sally with an apologetic air that he knows is entirely faked, “but Anderson wants to talk to you, and then Dr Hooper down at the morgue wants a word.”
“Right,” he says, because if Sally wants to send their subordinates off on other tasks, then that is her prerogative as his head Sergeant. Besides, canvasing in the estates is done always in pairs, with stab vests on, with patrol car backup, and always in the daylight hours. He would feel better about the matter if Sally was going out with the other three DSs, but Kapur has been with the team for nearly as long as she has, and Beckett came from the estates. The four of them together can (and will) take care of themselves. Besides, there will be the small army of constables trailing in their wake.
Sean leaves without another word, and he allows Sally to chivvy him towards his office, where Anderson is waiting with a stack of files and his characteristic frown. Greg makes a note to talk to her later because this has been going on for a while.
She has never said anything about it, but Sally doesn’t particularly care for Sean. No one who hasn’t seen her at her best (and her worst) would notice her dislike. For all her brash outspokenness, when it counts, Sally keeps her own secrets very well. It’s not that the two sergeants can’t stand the sight of each other, but there is this… coolness in her behaviour when she interacts with her peer. Greg would brush it off as merely Sally being protective
because he is her DI, and no one else’s
since she never leaves him alone with Sean to watch his back, but… Something tells him that is not it. Or, at least, that’s not the entire story. For some reason, she doesn’t trust the younger man, and Greg can’t figure out why.
Sean came on the team just a month or two Before, and when all hell was breaking loose, he served as Sally’s replacement whilst she was on garden leave and then suspension. The squad had been very quiet then, with half of the Inspectors still on garden leave and the other half on trial with internal investigations. The sergeants were busy trying to maintain some semblance of order among the constables, and it was just a mess.
When Sally came back as Greg’s right hand, there was a bit of jostling in the sergeants’ hierarchy before she resumed her position as his liaison to the CID’s unassigned sergeants and constables. The younger man seemed to take his unofficial quasi-demotion in stride, but there were moments of friction in the first couple of months, when everyone was still very raw about Sherlock Holmes and the fallout from his public disgrace. Nowadays, Sean seems content to follow Sally’s lead… except for that look of frustration that appears now and again whenever-
Greg pushes away that line of thought and focuses on Anderson’s briefing. When the case is closed, there will be time enough to ponder team dynamics.
Twelve days later, DS Donovan is ambushed on her way home from work.
Witnesses say there was a single attacker.
They say it seemed like she knew him.
A week later, DI Lestrade is attacked at a crime scene.
In the basement of the abandoned tenement
DS Dalbir Kapur discovers his dying boss
and DS Sean Pritchard
with the bloody knife
in hand.
Pritchard is arrested.
He never makes it to arraignment.
It’s not over.
Continued in All the King's Men (Part I)
Author: hope_tang
Rating: PG
Spoiler Warning:The Reichenbach Fall
Warnings:
[(includes potential story spoilers; click to open)]
assumed major character death, discussion of violent crime, non-graphic violence and attempted murder(s), brief mention of off-screen harm to children
Summary: The seven or eight months After are hell. The seventeen months after that aren’t much better.
Disclaimer:Other than being a fan, I have nothing to do with Sherlock. I’m not even British…
Betas: As always, my gratitude goes to agent_bandit, powdered_opium, bluewillowtree, and dkwrkm for reading over this story multiple times. Any remaining mistakes are my own.
Author’s Note: This can be read independently, or as a sequel to Disjunctive Pieces.
PART I
~
Ten months After, they’re working a bad case: a serial child abductor-murderer who targets London’s thriving immigrant communities. When they question the third victim’s sobbing, terrified parents, he sees a look in Sally’s eyes that he doesn’t particularly like, but he knows it’s in his too.
It’s an unvoiced, unwelcomed thought:
If he were here…
(They still call each other ‘Sir’ and ‘Sergeant,’ but they slip up sometimes.)
Then again, if he were here, we’d all be yelling at him for being an insensitive arse.
Maybe.
Three weeks later, when the Detective Inspector and his Sergeant go to question Brian Morris in his sixth-story flat, all hell breaks loose. The man is nervous, but neither Greg nor Sally is prepared for the knife he brandishes at them. (So much for a soothing cup of tea.)
Their witness-abruptly-turned-suspect refuses to come quietly and backs his way onto the balcony. Greg tries his best to talk the man down as Sally calls for armed response (and some back-up damnit!) Both police officers keep themselves between their suspect and his front door. It’s over.
Except it’s not.
They all see the moment when Morris decides that death is better than life in prison. Sally lunges in and grabs him before he goes over the edge. She nearly follows him over herself before Greg grabs the back of her shirt and pulls all of them back from certain death.
In the struggle that follows, a blur of fists and brute strength and where is the bloody fucking knife, somewhere in that scuffle, a blade plunges deep into unprotected flesh. Neither of the officers involved notice until Morris is face down in the carpet, hands cuffed behind his back, and the patrol cars have arrived on scene. Then-
Sir, are you all right?
It’s not my bl- Goddamnit, call an ambulance!
(Dimmock’s team finds a drugged eight-year-old girl, bound and gagged, in the basement.
At nightfall, she would have been victim number six.)
After Morris is processed into custody and Dimmock practically shoves him out of the office, Greg goes to wait in a sterile, obnoxiously comforting room on the surgical ward.
He waits.
wait
wait
wait
It’s in the early hours of the morning that he manages to talk his way into the recovery ward. He is exhausted and if he sits, he’ll sleep, so he stands vigil. Greg waits to see his very groggy Sergeant come out of the anaesthetic before he leaves to go back to work.
It is odd to see Sean Pritchard, Detective Sergeant, in her place,
but she has been his protégé for nearly five years.
He is used to her presence by his side.
She will be all right. She will.
Sympathetic colleagues mean that, hidden resentment or not, only one person asks after Sally’s condition and spreads the news to the rest of the unit. The DCI lets Greg give both the investigative and case statements in one go before putting him on desk duty. There is no sense in letting a Sergeant-less DI wander about London unsupervised.
Later that day, Greg goes back to University College Hospital during normal visiting hours. A flash of his warrant card at the front desk yields the floor and room number he needs. He knows that she’s fine, but he needs to know.
All hospitals are the same in their focused frenzy, and he walks past doctors, patients, and visitors without paying them any attention. They are the blur of humanity that he works in and with, but today, he doesn’t have the energy to take note of them as individuals. Absorbed in his own thoughts, Greg stumbles to a halt at the sound of a familiar, yet unexpected voice, drifting out into the wide corridor.
“Do you know what he’d say if he were here?”
The question is dryly spoken, with a hint of resigned amusement, as if both speaker and listener are rehashing a long-running conversation. The reply is quiet, but steady.
“A sentimental idiot,” says Sally before she adds, “If he were feeling generous.”
“Right.” There’s a nervous squeak of a cane’s slip-stop against the floor. “The thing is, he’d be right. You-.”
There is another pause before her guest continues in a not-entirely steady voice, “I’ve lost more people in my life than I ever wanted to. So has Greg.”
The detective inspector in question finds himself rocking back on his heels, as if struck by a gut punch. He doesn’t talk about it. He still doesn’t think about it. He has dealt with it by dealing with the After, and nothing…and nothing else. It’s almost been a year, and he still can’t say the word ‘suicide’ without feeling the need to vomit. He steadies himself against the wall and forces himself not to go down the path into years of regrets and unfinished business.
Inside the hospital room, Sally’s visitor orders with all the sternness of a commanding officer, “Don’t add yourself to the tally. He needs his sergeant to watch his back.”
A second squeak of the cane is all the warning Greg has to pull himself together. When John Watson comes out of Sally’s hospital room and their eyes meet, they don’t need to say a word. They exchange a nod and Greg manages a quiet ‘thank you’ and this will never be brought up when they meet at the pub on game night to heckle the football match.
As he enters her temporarily private room, Greg thinks this may be the first time that John has spoken willingly to Sally since… since After. They’re all not dealing with it in the same ways.
He pauses at the foot of her bed.
She stares at him studying her.
He finally breaks the silence with, “I’ll spare you the lecture, Sergeant.”
She looks tired and listless. It’s probably the morphine drip and the nature of being a patient stuck in the hospital, but she looks fragile, and his Sergeant Donovan has never been frail-a pain-in-the-arse, bright, outspoken, spitfire of a police officer, yes, but never delicate.
“I’m not,” she says firmly, holding his gaze. “I’m not.”
He walks around to take the seat by her bedside and sighs. “I didn’t say you were, but that was still damn stupid.”
“He was going for you, Sir. I couldn’t let that happen.”
Throwing yourself into danger for me isn’t going to bring him back, or undo our choices, he wants to tell her, but instead, he swallows hard and says, “Next time, we’re both wearing vests when we question suspects. No arguments.”
“You won’t get any from me.”
He doesn’t stay long. She looks ready to fall asleep on him, even without the pharmaceutical aids, and he needs sleep himself. Before he leaves, he tells her to rest up and then adds:
“Donovan, I need my sergeant watching my back.”
She nods and replies, “Yes, Boss.”
~
“I’ll go with you,” volunteers Sean Pritchard immediately, pulling on his jacket. Greg needs to follow-up a lead in Soho, and SOP says he should take a DS with him. He still doesn’t know the younger man very well, and a chat in the car on the way over and back would go a long way towards filling that knowledge gap.
It’s another stabbing case, and frankly, Greg has his private doubts about whether or not they’ll be able to close this one. No one wants to talk to the Met about the victim and they don’t have many leads. Still, they have to try because the victim was someone’s son, regardless of his poor choices in life.
“Actually, Pritchard,” says Sally from behind the younger man, her focus on an open file in her hands, “could you go with Kapur, Beckett, and Jones to re-canvas the estates?”
The casual question is a distracted order, wrapped in brisk tones and built on the understanding that Sally Donovan is a police officer crossed at one’s own peril. Like the rest of her peers and the constables, Sean nods in acquiescence. “Sure, but who’s with the boss, then?”
It’s brief, but Greg catches a flicker of annoyance in the younger man’s eyes before it is smoothed away. He wonders if he imagined it, but… a part of him says no. There’s more to Sean than meets the eye. Whether that is for better or worse, even after nearly two years of working with him, Greg doesn’t know.
“Sorry, Boss,” says Sally with an apologetic air that he knows is entirely faked, “but Anderson wants to talk to you, and then Dr Hooper down at the morgue wants a word.”
“Right,” he says, because if Sally wants to send their subordinates off on other tasks, then that is her prerogative as his head Sergeant. Besides, canvasing in the estates is done always in pairs, with stab vests on, with patrol car backup, and always in the daylight hours. He would feel better about the matter if Sally was going out with the other three DSs, but Kapur has been with the team for nearly as long as she has, and Beckett came from the estates. The four of them together can (and will) take care of themselves. Besides, there will be the small army of constables trailing in their wake.
Sean leaves without another word, and he allows Sally to chivvy him towards his office, where Anderson is waiting with a stack of files and his characteristic frown. Greg makes a note to talk to her later because this has been going on for a while.
She has never said anything about it, but Sally doesn’t particularly care for Sean. No one who hasn’t seen her at her best (and her worst) would notice her dislike. For all her brash outspokenness, when it counts, Sally keeps her own secrets very well. It’s not that the two sergeants can’t stand the sight of each other, but there is this… coolness in her behaviour when she interacts with her peer. Greg would brush it off as merely Sally being protective
because he is her DI, and no one else’s
since she never leaves him alone with Sean to watch his back, but… Something tells him that is not it. Or, at least, that’s not the entire story. For some reason, she doesn’t trust the younger man, and Greg can’t figure out why.
Sean came on the team just a month or two Before, and when all hell was breaking loose, he served as Sally’s replacement whilst she was on garden leave and then suspension. The squad had been very quiet then, with half of the Inspectors still on garden leave and the other half on trial with internal investigations. The sergeants were busy trying to maintain some semblance of order among the constables, and it was just a mess.
When Sally came back as Greg’s right hand, there was a bit of jostling in the sergeants’ hierarchy before she resumed her position as his liaison to the CID’s unassigned sergeants and constables. The younger man seemed to take his unofficial quasi-demotion in stride, but there were moments of friction in the first couple of months, when everyone was still very raw about Sherlock Holmes and the fallout from his public disgrace. Nowadays, Sean seems content to follow Sally’s lead… except for that look of frustration that appears now and again whenever-
Greg pushes away that line of thought and focuses on Anderson’s briefing. When the case is closed, there will be time enough to ponder team dynamics.
Twelve days later, DS Donovan is ambushed on her way home from work.
Witnesses say there was a single attacker.
They say it seemed like she knew him.
A week later, DI Lestrade is attacked at a crime scene.
In the basement of the abandoned tenement
DS Dalbir Kapur discovers his dying boss
and DS Sean Pritchard
with the bloody knife
in hand.
Pritchard is arrested.
He never makes it to arraignment.
It’s not over.
Continued in All the King's Men (Part I)