Warnings: Reference to drinking and alcoholism, spoilers for series 3 (The Empty Hearse and The Sign of Three)

Disclaimer: Don't own Sherlock

Chapter 8 – In Which There is No Happy Ending

Greg Lestrade was having a bad day.

He shouldn't have been; after all, weddings were supposed to be happy occasions. Yet even in the festivities of John and Mary's nuptials, he couldn't quite bring himself to be as joyous as he should have been.

It had been six months since Sherlock returned, and Greg had at least capitulated to the bastard enough to act surprised when he had shown up once again. It hadn't been as hard as he had first thought it would when he discovered that the detective really was alive after all; reappearing to Greg in some creepy underpass was not what he had been expecting, but then again, the man was a drama queen.

It had been nine months since that fateful day in the Diogenes Club, when Greg's second long-term relationship had ended. Hadn't people had more than that by the time they reached his age? Maybe he and Louise had split too late; there was no time for him to have had all of the relationships that he wanted to have. It was a thought that had struck him on the head one day about a week after he had broken up with Mycroft – rather rudely, one might say – and had stayed with him ever since.

It was on that day, nine months before the wedding, that he had first looked at the bottle of scotch in his fridge that he had been saving for a special occasion – and, maybe it had been far too early on his part to think that it would be possible, but a part of him had been hoping that that special occasion would be his engagement to the man he had got together with on the sofa after his first marriage disintegrated – and decided that it had sat there, idle, long enough.

Greg hadn't touched a drop of alcohol since downing all that whiskey on the night that Louise had lied to him about her whereabouts. He had a rather complicated relationship with the intoxicating substance, to the point where he knew that he really shouldn't be drinking it at all. He had met John's sister, who had a real problem, and he hoped that he wasn't as bad as she was, but there was still a small voice in the back of his head that told him that he wasn't as far off as he might hope.

At that moment in time, he hadn't really cared about how his starting drinking again might be perceived by those around him. Mycroft was the only one who had really noticed anything about him anyway by this point, and he wasn't around anymore to rebuke him for downing an entire bottle of scotch in a single evening. So he had snatched the bottle from the fridge, and done just that.

It had been a slippery slope since then, and by the happy day of the wedding, he knew that he was in trouble. He wasn't quite at the pouring-beer-on-his-cornflakes stage, but he feared that that is exactly what would start happening if he didn't stop soon. His only hope was to get over this breakup as soon as possible, which he really should have done by now, seeing as it had happened nine months ago. It had taken him a few mere weeks to get over the ending of his marriage, but Mycroft was proving a much more resilient heartache.

Maybe he had loved Mycroft more than Louise…

He shoved the thought away with another swig of champagne. It tasted awful – all alcohol did – but it didn't matter what it tasted like as long as it made him feel a little better. He had found that it hadn't had that effect on him yet, but he was determined to keep drinking until it did.

For now, he was happy with the placebo.

~{bad-day}~

Mycroft Holmes was having a bad day.

He had been invited to the wedding, but he had known from the moment that Sherlock had mentioned it to him that he wouldn't be in attendance. He was just the best man's brother, who was he to join in such festivities? After all, Greg would be there, and he couldn't deal with that.

Mycroft had never before let such strong emotions hold him captive before. He thought that he could master them, tame them, control them, rather than the other way around. He had become determined to do so when he had first noticed their presence, but it would seem that he was not invincible. He was just as susceptible to heartbreak as any other human being on the planet.

How dull.

He had been unaware of just how much it would hurt when he had realised that his relationship was over. It was the first relationship he had ever had; he had never had time for any others – not that he had had time for this one, but this one was different, he had made time. Not that he had ever had a desire for such a thing before, of course, but even so, he was surprised to find himself woefully unprepared.

Being unprepared was not something he often experienced, and with good reason.

As things got better with practice, upon entering a relationship he had steeled himself for messing up. He didn't enjoy messing up, but he had accepted that it was nevertheless inevitable, and could only hope that Greg would understand and forgive him his shortcomings. That he had was something that Mycroft knew he would be ever grateful for.

The breaking point of the wonderful time that they had spent together came in a form that Mycroft had not anticipated. After all, when they had got together, he had not known which of the plans that would come to pass once Sherlock and Moriarty got on top of the roof, and he had hoped beyond hope that it wouldn't come to Lazarus. Yet it had been out of his hands, and he watched his brother fall on CCTV from miles away, for some reason his brain not able to comprehend that it was all fake, a magic trick. He could not see the large blue crash mat that had been assembled underneath him, and a malevolent voice in the back of his mind was screaming at him that he was watching his brother really plummet to his death.

It had never been a part of the plan for anyone to find out about Sherlock's survival until the time was right, but even the Holmes boys hadn't counted on Anderson's endless theories and hypotheses. It was bound to attract attention, and once he realised that Greg had deduced – for he, too, was capable of such things – that Sherlock was alive, he had known that it was over. It had been too good to last. Nothing that good would ever have been able to last. Not for him, anyway.

It had been a week after the breakup that he had got his treadmill out of the shed. He ran every day when he was at home, as fast and as far as he could last before his entire body ached and he had the confidence to trust that he had worn himself out sufficiently to not remember any of his dreams; dreams that spoke of love lost and those times when he had been happier than any other in living memory.

He opted not to go to the wedding.

His treadmill was there for him instead.