Author's Note: End of the line – everybody off! I hope you enjoyed reading this even a fraction of how much I enjoyed writing it. I cannot thank you enough for the reviews/favourites/follows. Seriously. It makes my cold, mostly-dead heart burst in my chest.

I have a few other ideas rolling around – who knows, maybe you'll see me around these parts again. Until then, hugs and smooches for everyone! XOXO

Everything will be okay in the end.

If it's not okay, then it's not the end

~Fernando Sabino

While not usually one for platitudes, Lestrade had to admit that whoever had said, "Time heals all wounds" might have been on to something. As the days passed, the scars on his back and his mind and his heart were strengthened. Time, as it was wont to do, stitched the tears in the fabric of life back together. A little ragged perhaps, but no less reinforced.

And still—

There was a lingering uncertainty and residual dread. It was over but it wasn't over. There was an end but no finality. Not as long as Montgomery roamed free. That knowledge niggled on the periphery of his mind. It kept him checking for movement out of the corner of his eye. It kept him holding his breath, afraid to exhale. It kept him hoping for the best but expecting the worst. There was, he thought, a certain futility in trying to heal when the wound was still bleeding. It was like putting a band-aid on a gunshot wound.

For all its healing properties, time also knew how to bear down on a person. Lestrade had never been more aware of the passage of time than he was now. Everything was recorded on his mental calendar. Sherlock had arrived on Day 3. John had shown up on Day 5. Today was Day 7. He'd been home for a whole week. When had that happened? Somehow, single days had become a week. Soon, weeks would become months. Months would become years. It didn't seem possible and yet here it was, happening anyways.

It was one of those days where he felt like he had a hangover from thinking too much. The seventh day was supposed to be the day of rest, wasn't it? He needed to lie down. It turned out that it was less of a nap and more of a mini-coma. He awoke three hours later in that post-nap fugue where it was hard to tell what year it was, let alone what time it was. He scowled at the clock. He suspected time was just taking the piss out of him at this point.

Stifling a yawn, he stumbled into the living room where he had left John and Sherlock hours before. A third, unexpected figure was perched in his armchair, lazily sipping a cup of tea. Lestrade stopped abruptly, blinking away the last remnants of sleep to be sure he wasn't dreaming.

"How are you doing, Detective Inspector?" Mycroft Holmes was the only person who could make vague banalities sound so curiously ominous.

Lestrade's heart twisted and tightened like a screw. There was only one reason why Mycroft would materialize in his flat.

"I suppose the answer to your question depends on what you're here to tell me," said Lestrade carefully.

A thin smile crossed Mycroft's lips. "Direct and suspicious of my motivations. You've been spending too much time with my little brother." He gestured for Lestrade to sit.

Suddenly very much awake, Lestrade sank into the sofa cushions, trying futilely to decipher any clues in Mycroft's face. All he was able to gather was that he would never want to play poker with this blank canvass of a man.

Where Sherlock was all pomp and circumstance when it came to revealing information, Mycroft was efficient and direct.

"Edward Montgomery is dead."

His mouth suddenly desert dry, it took some force for Lestrade to get his question out, "You're sure?"

The lines around Mycroft's mouth hardened. "Quite."

Dead. Dead. Dead.

Lestrade kept chanting the word over in his head. The conversation continued but he wasn't listening. The details didn't matter. Not to him.

Dead. Dead. Dead.

There were too many thoughts to think, too many feelings to feel.

Dead. Dead. Dead.

He tuned back into the world's frequency when he realized three faces were looking at him expectantly. He had missed something important, obviously.

"Sorry. Say again?"

"We've found and identified the remains of your three missing men," Mycroft repeated.

A terse pause filled the room.

And Lestrade understood.

"How many others?" he asked quietly.

Montgomery had alluded to the possibility of more victims, ones that the Yard didn't even know about. Despite not wanting to believe him, Lestrade had always suspected that it wasn't just a throwaway comment.

"Four confirmed. There is…evidence-" Mycroft made a face, as if the word tasted sour, "—that there are more."

"Define 'more'," snapped Sherlock, in no mood for his brother's maddening non-answers.

"Is 'many' an adequate definition?" Mycroft bit back.

"Stop it," John warned, voice laced with years of military service.

The urge to escape the flat overwhelmed Lestrade. The air was too thin. Mumbling something about needing a moment, he escaped to the balcony, where he gulped the fresh air in greedily. The crispness was soothing, like aloe on a burn. He stared out into the evening sky as it turned scarlet with the sinking sun. The watchful eyes of the London lights blinked back at him.

Back inside, the tension between Mycroft and Sherlock had not yet abated. A heated, intense, and wordless dialogue was taking place as they communicated furiously with their eyes. Any minute now, the Holmes brothers were going to have words. Big, condescending, probably loud words.

John decided it best to evict himself from the conversation before it could begin. When he rose to leave, neither man stopped him.

He nodded curtly at the silently feuding pair. "Right. Have at it then."

The door had scarcely clicked shut behind John before Sherlock verbally pounced.

"What happened?" he asked, hands folded, fingertips on his chin.

Mycroft gave him a withering look. "Did I stutter? Was my explanation perhaps unclear? I told you, Edward Montgomery is dead, as are his associates."

"I'm not certain if you are being deliberately vague or decidedly obtuse. Montgomery is—was—a difficult man to track down. I don't imagine he just showed up at your door, begging to be put out of his miserable existence."

"The 'how' is incidental," said Mycroft dismissively. "Suffice it to say, my people are good. He was difficult to find, yes, but not impossible. Even dead men can't stay hidden for long. I'd imagine you, of all people, would know that?"

"I can always count on you to resurrect my past, pun intended," said Sherlock irritably. "So you found him. That doesn't tell me how he died."

"You already know how; certainly you've deduced that by now."

"Obviously. But I thought it might be nice to hear it from you all the same."

There was an involuntary twitch by the corner of Mycroft's mouth. "He resisted our attempts to apprehend him peacefully. As a result, he sustained a fatal gunshot wound to the head."

It wasn't the whole story. It wasn't even part of the story. It was like trying to make sense of a novel when every other word was redacted. And there was nothing that Sherlock liked more than being able to make something out of nothing.

"You were there," Sherlock surmised. "You didn't just oversee the operation. You participated in it."

An arched eyebrow was the only reply.

"Come now, Mycroft. It's obvious. You aren't closing your right hand completely. You inured the knuckles on your dominant hand. You hit something, and hard. Seeing as you're not much one for getting your hands dirty, it would have taken an extraordinarily egregious comment or action to elicit a physical response from you. There's no signs of a struggle, which rules out an attack. So Montgomery said something, antagonized you. And you struck him."

Sherlock smirked at the very idea of Mycroft, who found fisticuffs so plebian, so beneath him, punching someone. How trashy. How common Sherlock wished he had been there to see his brother slumming it.

"He filled in some gaps in my knowledge that I would have rather remained empty," Mycroft said, restrained and distant.

Sherlock's smug gratification at his brother's venture into the ordinary dissipated. It didn't seem so trashy and common now. Rather, it just seemed tragically noble.

"He told you what he did," Sherlock whispered.

Suddenly, and for the briefest of moments, the carefully drawn curtains at the window of Mycroft's soul parted and Sherlock caught an unwelcome glimpse inside.

"Every gory detail."

There was a heavy pause. Then—

"What really happened Mycroft?"

"He resisted," replied Mycroft flatly. He stared past Sherlock to the figure in the balcony.

Two words that said so much.

"You pulled the trigger," Sherlock stated quietly.

"I have to go," said Mycroft simply, refusing to confirm or deny. "I'll be in touch."

He was almost out the door when Sherlock's voice stopped him.

"Thank you."

Mycroft turned. He looked from Sherlock to the balcony and back again.

"I didn't do it for you."

And he was gone.

Sherlock joined Lestrade on the balcony, staring at the cotton candy clouds that were rolling in on the rosé sky.

"Think the storm will pass over us?"

"What's expression – 'Red sky at night, sailor's delight; red sky at morning, sailor's warning'? I think it might skip us this time," Lestrade replied.

Sherlock was studying Lestrade and not the sky. "Hope so. Feels like it's been raining forever."

"For a while, I thought it might never stop," Lestrade admitted. "But it did. It always does."

"It will rain again," cautioned Sherlock.

Lestrade smiled and glanced at the man beside him. "Yes, it will. But you can't walk around with an umbrella, waiting for it to rain though, can you?"

"No," said Sherlock, "you can't. Just – don't be afraid to seek out shelter from the storm when it does hit."

Lestrade patted Sherlock's arm. "I won't."

They stood, watching the uncertain sky.

The rain would fall where and when it wanted to.

It would play a waltz in ¾ time as he weaved in and out of the raindrops. Many of the broken shards of the past had been reduced to dust with the endless steps of the dance. Those that remained would be navigated with cautious fortitude until they too were nothing but memories.

The dance, like life, had static and dynamic moments, contrast of light and shade, times to rise and fall.

Let the waltz play on.