Title: From Death

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 shaved his head two months before Sherlock returned from the grave. (Character study of Sherlock and Lestrade's reunion in TEH)

Written: 4/18/14

Notes: This idea popped into my head while noticing Lestrade's significantly shorter hair in "The Empty Hearse." I felt that there was way too little of Lestrade in S3 and this short piece provided a nice opportunity for some character study after several months without a Lestrade-centered story. Please excuse any blatant errors as I had eye surgery yesterday. As always, I hope I did the characters justice. Thank you for reading and for your continued support. I cherish every response.

Lestrade may have been a man intimately familiar with death, but he was hardly the sort of person who dealt with the subject by actively courting it.

Today, however, he just didn't have it in him to fight old, dormant battles; was too soul-crushingly weary to do anything but revert back to the comfortable routine of old habit – no matter how many years it had been since declaring victory.

He suppressed a shiver as the car park's damp chill took advantage of his short hair and tapped the cigarette from throat to chin before slipping it between his lips. Flipping open his lighter, he was the picture of a man conflicted – lungs ready to inhale the very word his growing hair still protested.

When Lestrade had shaved his head two months ago, it was John Watson – worn by grief, guilt, and isolation, yet ever perceptive – who had immediately recognized the act for what it was with one strained word: "Who?"

"My niece's classmate. Leukaemia. He's just starting chemotherapy."

When Ellie had told him about her friend Billy Wyman and his dream of being a detective, Lestrade took the story directly to Scotland Yard. Nearly two dozen Yarders joined him in shaving their heads in solidarity with Billy and a group of them began making regular visits to the hospital, teaching him investigative techniques. Donovan taped smiley faces on their isolation masks when the day they brought Billy his own warrant card coincided with a dangerously low blood count. Dimmock brought boxes of his father's old Hardy Boys books. And Lestrade would close the laptop each evening after Billy helped solve another made-up case with a proud, "Well done, Inspector." To which Billy, dwarfed by IV poles and absently scratching the edges of his portacath dressing as he fell asleep, would beam, "Thanks, Inspector Greg."

Detective Inspector Billy Wyman died last week.

He was eight years old.

The sun had shone as fiercely as the wind whipped the mourners standing around the small casket. Two dozen Scotland Yard officers in full dress uniform and varying degrees of baldness paid their respects. Donovan proudly removed her wig. Lestrade ran a world-weary hand over his short gray bristles. And Ellie stood next to her mum, bald-headed and crying; her first meeting with death.

Lestrade brought the lighter to his cigarette, only to have death speak to him in a voice gone two years.

"Those things will kill you."

Self-assured, 'I'm cleverer than you' wit. Emerging from car park shadows with the same showy drama favored in his deductive reveals; rising from the blood-stained pavement of violent death without the vaguest notion of the grief he'd caused. Shrouded and strengthened by the coat now synonymous with his name, with all the dark, imposing presence of the Grim Reaper himself.

Sherlock bloody Holmes. Back from the dead.

Those things will kill you.

Yeah, Lestrade thought. As much as jumping off that roof should have killed you. As much as it killed John, Mrs. Hudson, me. As much as we're going to kill you – again – unless you have a damn good reason for putting us all through that hell.

The lighter's flame flickered in his cupped hands; body frozen and mind racing. There was so much he wanted to say, so much he could have said. What he did end up saying consisted of three words – one for each of those hurt most by Sherlock's actions. One for each of the people who would probably never know that Sherlock had hurt them because he cared enough to protect them.

Three words that were equal parts anger and fondness: "Oooh, you bastard."

Because Lestrade was angry; angry that Sherlock had let his friends grieve for two years and was now swanning back into their lives as if nothing had ever happened. Angry that Sherlock got to come back from the dead and move toward a future denied to an eight year old kid by the random cruelty of genetics.

But in the end, Lestrade was a man who knew how to honor life even when surrounded by death. And so the fondness won out and he hugged the bastard for all he was worth.

Because at least one kid got to live his dream of being a detective.