Fic: Acts of Madmen

[impishtubist]

Title: Acts Of Madmen
Characters: Sherlock Holmes, John Watson, DI Lestrade, Mycroft Holmes
Pairing: Lestrade/Sherlock
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: I don’t own them.
Word Count: c. 3,600
Warnings: Implied Violence
Spoilers: through TGG
Beta: the lovely and ever-patient canonisrelative

Summary: Lestrade visits a seriously injured Sherlock and John in the hospital after their encounter with Moriarty at the pool. Set between "Nor The Years Condemn" and "They're Gonna Be All Right," but can stand alone.

Notes: Apologies to those on my f-list, who are probably going to be story-bombed over the next few weeks. I have a bunch of fics that have been sitting on my hard drive for ages and I've decided I want try to get some of them out before the second series airs - this is the first of them. Please don't hate me!


Mycroft Holmes is murmuring at his side, rattling off his brother’s injuries as though he is reading from an economic report.

Lestrade doesn’t hear a word of it.

Sherlock is translucent against the white of the hospital sheets, and there’s a mask strapped to his face that’s aiding in his breathing. His cheeks are hollow and his breaths are shallow and Lestrade feels ill just looking at him. It’s a few hours after dawn, now, and the horror of the previous night has given way to bright sunlight and quiet streets. The contrast is jarring.

“Sorry,” Lestrade says suddenly, cutting off the end of Mycroft’s sentence. “What was that?”

“Flail chest,” Mycroft repeats patiently. “It is an injury associated with high-energy impacts. It means that a portion of his chest wall broke off from the rest and was moving separately from his ribcage. That’s why the surgery took so long.”

“He’ll need physical therapy when this is all over,” Sherlock’s nameless doctor says at last, content until now to let Mycroft do the explaining, and Lestrade turns bleary eyes on him. He’s still not comprehending. The night has been too long, and Sherlock is too pale.

“Therapy...for his ribs?”

“No,” the doctor says patiently. “He’ll need it for his arm. He broke one of his first ribs upon impact after the explosion - those are extremely difficult to damage, and if it does happen it can be life-threatening. When survived, the injury can be life-changing as well, because it lies near the brachial plexus of nerves.”

“And what happens if those nerves get damaged?” Lestrade asks, a horrible knot forming in his stomach.

“Paralysis of the arm,” Mycroft says promptly, and Lestrade  goes weak before he adds, “at the worst. In his case, they caught it in surgery and not long after the explosion, so the outlook is good.”

“Which arm?” Lestrade asks, as though it matters. Either would impact his ability to play the violin.

"The left."

“All right, then,” Lestrade whispers, rubbing the back of his neck. “I don’t suppose he knows?”

“We woke him long enough in the recovery room to check his cognition,” the doctor tells him. “He’s been resting ever since. He was groggy as it was, and -”

“ - and that’s not something you just spring on someone straight out of surgery. Yeah, I know.” Lestrade squares his shoulders. “Guess it’s on me, then.”

Mycroft has the decency to look apologetic, and Lestrade decides that he’s going to milk this while he can.

“On your way out,” he says, because he knows that stance, the casual lean on the umbrella that signals he’s about to make an exit, “see to it that Doctor Watson is brought in here.”

Both the men make noises of quiet protest, but Lestrade holds up a hand and they silence immediately.

“He will tear apart this hospital,” he says quietly, “if he wakes and John isn’t in his line of sight. You know that as well as I do, Mr. Holmes. Now, I suggest that we don’t make this recovery harder on him than it’s already going to be. How does that sound?”

He gives the two of them a mirthless smile, and from the way that Mycroft furrows his brow he knows he’s won this battle. Sherlock’s injuries will leave him bedridden for some time, but Lestrade knows that that won’t stop him from trying to go see John. Mycroft is wise enough to  know, even if he resists at first, which battles to put up with and which to avoid altogether - and not even Lestrade, if he had the entirety of Scotland Yard at his side, would want to stand between Sherlock and John.

Mycroft leaves with his assurances that John will be moved into the room as soon as he wakes, and Lestrade accepts this as the best he’s going to get. It’s better than nothing at all.

And then, quite suddenly, Lestrade is alone. He stands still at the foot of Sherlock’s bed and, with nothing to distract himself from the detective’s prone form, he finds he is unable to look away from the sight of the battered body. Sherlock’s face is puffy and bruised, one eye already blackened and the other heading in that direction. His left hand is wrapped in gauze; what Lestrade can see of it (the fingertips) is a mass of burned flesh. His right hand is bruised and scraped, but escaped major injury. He’ll recover full use of them, according to Mycroft, but it will take some time.

Lestrade can’t imagine Sherlock without use of his hands. There are small blessings to be found in this dire situation, and that is one of them.

He stands over Sherlock and presses his hand to the detective’s shoulder, as though to reassure him - though it’s more for his own benefit than anything else, that he’ll admit. Sherlock is real beneath his hand and while he’s obviously far from well, he at least is alive. His chest rises and falls and it is steady, though he breathes easily only because of the mask. His heartbeat is strong, according to the monitors and verified by Lestrade’s fingers, which seek out the tell-tale pulse on the side of his neck. He wonders how much pain the detective will be in when he wakes fully; he wonders how much he is feeling now, even under the cloak of a drug-induced sleep.

That question is brutally answered for him two hours later, when Sherlock wakes because his latest dose of medication is starting to wear off. The first sound that slips from his throat is a strangled whimper that rattles deep in his chest, and bloodshot eyes snap open to fix on the ceiling. The sudden noise jolts Lestrade from the half-doze he had slipped into, and he is instantly alert.

“Sherlock,” he says, pressing a hand to his shoulder, moving so that Sherlock can see him. Sherlock’s eyes flick to his, and his breathing becomes more labored with each passing second. Lestrade’s fingers find the pulse in his neck, and verify that it’s racing out of control. He’s panicking. “Sherlock, calm down. It’s safe; you’re safe. You’re in hospital. Try to breathe.”

Sherlock squeezes his eyes shut and he brings his mobile arm up to his face, pushing at the mask in an effort to knock it free.

“No - hold on - Sherlock, let me, you’ll only hurt yourself,” Lestrade says, alarmed at his desperation, and pushes the arm back down on the bed. “Hold still a moment.”

He waits until Sherlock’s movements still, and then carefully removes the mask from his face. Sherlock looks relieved to be free of the contraption, even though his breathing becomes strained almost at once.

“Greg,” he mutters, eyes slipping closed for a moment before opening again to look at Lestrade.

“I suppose it’d be a waste of breath to ask how you feel,” Lestrade says, trying to give him a smile.

“Yet - you wasted,” Sherlock says slowly, stopping for breath at nearly every word, “it - anyway.”

“Are you in a lot of pain?”

“Bearable,” Sherlock grunts, which means yes.

“What can I do?”

But Sherlock is distracted; his gaze keeps straying to the left side of his body, and he’s frowning as though he’s concentrating very hard at something.

“Arm,” Sherlock whispers finally, staring in confusion at his fingers. He tries to lift his torso off the bed in order to get a better look, but Lestrade presses him back, realizing that he must have been trying to move his arm.

“Let me explain,” he says softly. “Just - just relax, and I promise I’ll tell you everything. All right?”

Sherlock says nothing, but then he doesn’t make a move, either, and so Lestrade fits the mask around his face again and waits until his breathing eases before continuing. He explains everything he learned from Mycroft and the doctor earlier, hoping that he’s not leaving anything important out. Lord knows he wasn’t exactly all that with it the first time around - who knows what information he might have missed.

“There might be some paralysis,” he says steadily, and he has no idea how he manages to get the words out so calmly. “But they won’t know just yet. They think they caught it in time, though, and that with some therapy you’ll be fine.”

Sherlock blinks blearily and he wonders how much the man is comprehending. His eyes are fixed unwaveringly, if a bit unfocused, on Lestrade, and he very slowly brings his right hand up to his face. He grasps the mask loosely, tugging at it, but in his weakened state he’s not able to do much more than nudge it out of place. Lestrade, against his better judgement, removes it once more, because he can’t imagine how trapped Sherlock must feel right now - unable to move, unable to think clearly, unable to even speak.

Sherlock’s jaw works for several moments, but no sound emerges. His chest hitches, and Lestrade lays a hand flat against his sternum. He makes a hushing sound, as calmly as he can, and then says, “John is fine.”

He’s guessed right at what was clawing at Sherlock’s mind, because the detective stops his struggling and nods, once, thankful. Lestrade tries to put the mask back over his face, but Sherlock moves away as much as he’s able within the confines of the bed.

“No,” he whispers, voice brittle. “Leave it - off.”

“You need it, though.”

“Not yet,” Sherlock rasps. “I can - breathe. And I need to - know - what happened. And so - do you.”

“It can wait.”

“No,” Sherlock says with as much force as he can manage. It sounds ragged. “You need - to know.”

“Right, okay,” Lestrade says, knowing that it’s a losing battle. He wasn’t going to start saying no to Sherlock now. “But this mask is going back if your breathing starts to get worse, yeah?”

He knows that’s a lie, too, because Sherlock already is having issues, and it doesn’t sound like it’s getting better as the moments drag by. But he can’t bring himself to trap the man behind the piece of plastic again; not yet, anyway.

“John - wasn’t supposed - to be there,” Sherlock tells him, the breath between each word little more than a gasp. Lestrade thinks he can hear a rattle in his chest. “It was - just going to - be  me. But - I don’t - he was there -”

“Stop,” Lestrade commands, and squeezes his upper arm. “John’s fine. We don’t know a lot of what happened, and you’ll have to fill us in, but he’s fine. He’s going to recover completely. Your brother’s working on getting him in here with you. All right?”

Sherlock nods.

The question tugs at Lestrade’s throat, the one he knows he’s going to regret asking - regret not only what he hears, but that he’s made Sherlock speak in the first place. He asks it anyway.

“What happened in there, Sherlock?”

The story comes out over the course of nearly an hour - Sherlock recounting the post to the forum, the meeting, the nasty surprise that greeted him when it was John who stepped from the shadows. Lestrade’s heart tugs at the words, because he’s never heard Sherlock so devastated at the mere thought that someone might have betrayed him - that someone might have only been pretending to care for him.

They pause several times throughout to put the oxygen mask back on, and by the time Sherlock gets to the end he’s aching with exhaustion. He asks after Moriarty; with a leaden heart, Lestrade is forced to admit they didn't find anyone else in the rubble. Sherlock looks as though he expected that answer.

Lestrade tries to get him to sleep; Sherlock refuses. His eyes flick to Lestrade’s hands, and then back up to his face.

“You - got me out.”

Lestrade nods slowly. The entirety of the night’s events is written on him, from the shirt he’s wearing that’s gone stiff with blood to the layers of skin he scraped off his hands in his haste to get to the bodies buried in the rubble. It would have been pointless to try to keep from Sherlock, and speaks volumes to his condition that it’s taken him this long to notice.

“John?”

“Him, too,” Lestrade admits finally. “Your brother saw the post on your forum and alerted the authorities - and then called me. I found John first. His injuries aren’t nearly as severe as yours, probably because we got to him so quickly. And then...I went after you.”

“Idiot,” Sherlock says in one low hiss, and then adds, “Mask.”

Lestrade puts the mask back on his face. Sherlock’s eyes slip closed as his breathing deepens, and Lestrade thinks for a while that perhaps he’s finally succeeded in getting Sherlock to rest. But then the eyes blink open, and the mask is pushed away again.

“Gregory,” he whispers, his voice slightly stronger, and God, when has Sherlock ever referred to him by his full first name? “You can’t do that. If I lost you - I’m quite certain that I - would die.”

“I don’t understand, Sherlock,” Lestrade says softly. The detective’s lips quirk into the smallest of smiles, and Lestrade thinks it’s the most wonderful sight he’s seen all night.

“You are - my world. And if that world - stops, then I would - stop. I would literally end - because you ended. Do you see?”

Lestrade brushes a strand of stubborn hair away from Sherlock’s face. It falls back again anyway. “I think that medicine’s gone to your head. Don’t say things like that; you have John.”

“Yes. And I - am grateful. But he’s - not you. And you - can’t be so foolish - anymore. You can’t risk - it. Because he knows - about you.”

“Moriarty?”

Sherlock nods weakly. Lestrade uses his sleeve to wipe at the sheen of sweat on Sherlock’s forehead, buying himself a few extra seconds to think. What was there to know? They had never bothered defining anything, not in the five years they had known one another. Some days, Lestrade felt as though he knew even less about Sherlock than he knew the day they met.

But just because they don’t bother labeling it doesn’t mean there’s nothing there, Lestrade knows. Everyone has assumptions, and everyone draws conclusions, and not all of them are necessarily unfounded.

“The child,” Sherlock continues by way of explanation. “Fourth - pip.”

God. That terrified little boy, Moriarty’s almost-victim - no, victim; the boy had been so traumatized by the time they got to him that he couldn’t even speak - and the way the ground had dropped from beneath Lestrade’s feet the moment the voice came over the phone and he recognized it as a child. Those eight seconds while Sherlock worked to solve the puzzle had been nauseating; the relief when he finally did, dizzying.

“The - fourth victim,” Sherlock wheezes, vocalizing the connection that Lestrade is making in his mind, “wasn’t meant - for me. It was a message - to - you. He knows - that you would care.”

“You care, too,” Lestrade whispers.

“I cared for - the game. You care for - the - people. And especially - the children. Always - have.” Sherlock pauses for several long moments, trying to draw air, and Lestrade puts the mask back over his face. The detective closes his eyes and Lestrade rubs gentle circles into his shoulder until his breathing evens out.

“All right. So what if he does know about me?” Lestrade asks while Sherlock breathes. “He knows - what? That I call you in to help on crime scenes now and then? That you tease me mercilessly about my hair - yes, you do, don’t try to deny it. That you infuriate me?”

Lestrade traces Sherlock’s brow with his finger, and the detective stares at him with medicine-bleary eyes.

“Does he know that I think you’re extraordinary? That I think you’re the most brilliant man I’ve ever met?”

Sherlock pushes his hand away, and the oxygen mask with it.

“He knows that I am fond of you,” he rasps. “And that’s as - good as any - reason to kill you. If you’re lucky. He will - use - you - against me. Like he used John. He likes - to play.”

“What are you getting at, Sherlock?”

Sherlock lifts heavy eyes to his face.

“You have - to leave. Leave - and forget - me.”

Lestrade’s answer is instantaneous, coming almost before Sherlock grinds out his last word: “No.”

“Don’t be - a fool,” Sherlock hisses. “Now is not the time for your - abominable stupidity.”

“Sherlock, at the pool, when John told you to run,” Lestrade murmurs, putting a hand on the sweaty curls, “what did you think?”

“That he was - an idiot,” Sherlock grinds out.

“And  what do you think I’m going to say to you now?”

“Lestrade, I am  - trying to save - your life!”

“What makes you think I want to be saved?” Lestrade says softly.

Sherlock blinks at him, licks his lips slowly; deliberately. He looks away, and says to the ceiling, “I played his game and John -  ended up with a bomb - strapped to his chest. What makes you think - you’ll be any - better off?”

“I don’t see how leaving would help, if he already knows about me.” Lestrade fits the oxygen mask over Sherlock’s face for two minutes, and then pulls it away again so he can respond.

“He will lose - interest in you. So long as we - make him believe - that you are no longer important - to me,” Sherlock rasps. “I will ask - the same - of John when - he wakes.”

Lestrade shakes his head.

“You’re a fool if you think I’m the type of man who spends any amount of time worried for his life. And you’re an idiot if you think I’m the type of man who walks away when his friends are in danger, or injured. That’s not a way to live, and I won’t. Neither will John.”

“Oh, why couldn’t - you be - a coward - for once?” Sherlock growls.

Because the person I love most in this world is in danger, and I fear only for him.

“I would never let you prevent me from protecting the two of you. Understand? Never.” Lestrade wraps both his broad hands around Sherlock’s uninjured one, feeling the pressure of the ring on his left hand as it presses into Sherlock’s skin.

“Not going anywhere,” he says thickly.

“You’ve said - more than once - that I’m selfish,” Sherlock wheezes finally. “Right? So let - me be - selfish, here. I don’t want - anyone else - harmed because of - my aversion to boredom. I don’t want - that responsibility. Not worth - it.”

“It’s very worth it,” Lestrade says fiercely. “You’re worth it. And you didn’t do this, Sherlock. The bombs, the deaths - none of that was you.”

“I didn’t - physically do it, no,” Sherlock says, but the other half of his sentence hangs heavily in the air between them.

“You did nothing,” Lestrade insists. Sherlock grimaces.

“I played - the - game,” he rasps.

“You investigated. There’s a difference.”

“Is there?” Sherlock’s right hand curls into a fist under Lestrade’s grip. “And he - got away.”

“You didn’t kill that old woman, or those people in her building,” he tells Sherlock fiercely. “You didn’t strap a bomb to John Watson’s chest, and you didn’t train the snipers on him.  It was the work of a madman, Sherlock. It was the act of a madman.”

“But I am mad,” Sherlock rasps, even though it pains him, and Lestrade wishes he would stop. “Isn’t - that right?”

“No,” Lestrade says earnestly. “No, of course not. How can you even think that?”

“What’s the - difference, then, Lestrade?” Sherlock returns. “Difference - between us?”

“The difference?” Lestrade gives a bark of a laugh, and it sounds borderline hysterical to his ears .”The difference, Sherlock, is that you’re the good man.”

Sherlock’s grin is lopsided around his busted lip. He struggles to draw air into his constricted lungs, straining against the bandages that bind his torso, gathering breath for his next words. Lestrade places a hand on his shoulder, silently begging him to be quiet.

“You - always were -” he manages, “ - far too kind.”

Lestrade shatters, the last of his defenses destroyed with just six words.

“I have my fair share of regrets, Sherlock,” he says brokenly, fighting the slow burn gathering behind his eyes. “Enough to last me a lifetime. You aren’t one of them.”

He swipes his thumb across the corner of Sherlock’s left eye, and then does the same for the right.

In five years, he’s never seen Sherlock cry.

“It was the act of a madman,” he whispers again, and leans over to brush his lips over Sherlock’s fluttering eyelids. “Now get some rest. And like it or not, I’ll be here when you wake up.”

Sherlock swallows hard and reaches for Lestrade's knee. Lestrade recognizes the question floating behind the exhausted blue eyes and adds, in a low voice, “Because you aren’t the only one whose world would end.”

“Yours, too?” Sherlock rasps. Lestrade fits the mask back over Sherlock's face and then takes his good hand in both of his again.

“Yeah, sunshine,” he says, bringing the hand up and brushing his lips across the torn knuckles. “Yeah. Mine, too.”

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Final Notes: Title and the "act of a madman" refrain are courtesy Aaron Sorkin's The West Wing.

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