Hummingbird2 assures me she's a sucker for parental!Lestrade, so I wrote this little 221B just for her. A warning though - very angsty!
Disclaimer: Don't own - wish I did :)

'I did care. More I think that he would ever have realised.'

From a distance he watched the funeral, the few mourners included a handful of homeless people, and he sighed. Yet he had felt unable to move closer, to pay his respects while the other man's friends were stood around the graveside.

So instead Detective Inspector Gregory Lestrade stood and watched as the man he had looked upon almost as a son was lowered into his grave, the polished handles of his coffin glinting in the sunlight, the sound of quiet sobbing floating back at him across the still air.

How long he stood there he really didn't know. Through blurred vision he saw the mourners walk slowly away, and angrily he wiped the tears from his eyes, mopped the wet tracks from his cheeks.

As the sun slowly dipped he stood, still watching over the young man, a young man who would now never grow old, as he himself had grown old over these past days, watching as the gravediggers completed the business of covering the coffin, before walking across from among the yew trees.

"I wish I understood why you jumped." He addressed the cold mound of earth. "Surely you knew I'd have done anything to help prove your innocence."

But the cold earth never once answered back.