Chapter Text
1973 – Greg Lestrade, aged 1
When Gregory Lestrade turned one year old, a quiet concern began to settle over the household, one that no one quite knew how to name.
The child slept too much.
At first, no one thought it unusual. Babies sleep a great deal during their first years; everyone knows that. Yet as the weeks passed and the number of hours Gregory lay still in his small cot did not diminish and in fact seemed to grow longer, the family’s early reassurance slowly gave way to a quiet, lingering unease.
The little Lestrade house often fell into a peculiar kind of silence. There was no sharp crying demanding to be picked up, no small unsteady footsteps wandering along the hallway, none of the familiar chaos of a child discovering the world for the first time. There was only Gregory sleeping, the small blanket rising and falling with the steady rhythm of his breathing.
His mother often stood beside the cot and gently placed a hand upon the child’s chest, simply to make sure he was still breathing. She did it so often that it became almost an unconscious habit. Sometimes she would wake in the middle of the night and walk into the next room, bending over the cot just to look at her son once more.
Occasionally, Greg opened his eyes, but only for a moment. The chocolate-brown eyes of the little boy would still be clouded with sleep, wandering slowly around the room as though trying to remember where he was before closing again.
And he would sleep.
When Greg turned one, his parents finally took him to see a doctor. The surgery smelled of antiseptic, lit by cold white lamps, and filled with the soft rustle of medical notes being turned.
Gregory was placed upon the examination table, small and quiet to the point of hardly moving at all. The doctor checked him for a long time. His heartbeat was normal, his lungs strong, his neurological reflexes stable. His weight and height were exactly where they should be for a child his age.
After completing every test he could reasonably think of, the doctor removed his spectacles and looked at Greg’s parents with a faint air of helplessness.
The child, he said, was perfectly healthy.
Perhaps he simply liked to sleep.
It was not an answer that truly reassured anyone, but there was no other explanation to offer. And so the Lestrade family continued living with the peculiar rhythm of their eldest son.
Greg slept.
He slept deeply and for long stretches, and his sleep did not resemble that of other children. It was not the light, restless sleep of infancy, nor the blank unconsciousness of a newborn. There was something deeper about it, as though he were travelling somewhere very far away.
No one knew that Gregory Lestrade in truth possessed a secret. A small secret, impossible to explain, known only to him and to one other person whose name he did not yet know.
During those unusually long sleeps, Greg was not truly asleep. At least not entirely.
There was somewhere he always returned to when he closed his eyes.
A vague, half-formed place where light and shadow mingled like morning mist. A place where there were no adults talking, no clatter of dishes in the kitchen, no noise at all. Only silence and a strange, familiar sense of belonging.
Greg did not know when he had first gone there. For a child of one year old, the concept of time scarcely existed. But he knew, with the simple instinct of a small child, that in that place he was safe.
This strange state continued until Gregory was a year and a half old.
Then one day the peculiar cycle ended.
Gregory woke up, and this time he did not fall back into those long sleeps again.
Instead, he began pulling everything within reach onto the floor. He learned how to open cupboard doors and empty their contents like a small storm passing through the house.
His parents watched their son race around the sitting room with what seemed like endless energy, hardly able to believe this was the same child who had once lain motionless for hours in his cot.
They had feared Gregory might be a quiet child.
Or worse, that there might be something wrong with him, something they did not yet understand.
But now the boy laughed too much, ran too quickly, and caused far too much trouble to be considered quiet.
That day, the Lestrades thanked God many times, even though they were not, in truth, a particularly religious family.
…
1974 – Greg Lestrade, aged 2
When Greg Lestrade entered the second year of his life, the boy still hardly spoke. The few words that escaped his mouth were only scattered syllables: Papa, Mum, sometimes Grandad or Grandma. There were no full sentences, no babbling chains of childish words like those spoken by other children his age in the village.
But this no longer worried the Lestrade family as much as it once had. After the long period of unusually heavy sleeping, Greg was now full of energy, running about everywhere like a small gust of wind.
The house where he had been born stood in the countryside of Somerset, a place so quiet that sometimes one could hear the wind moving through the long grass. Behind the Lestrade home lay a wide garden. It was not the sort of carefully trimmed garden belonging to wealthy families, but a piece of natural land where the grass grew freely, and wildflowers bloomed in bright little clusters. Further beyond stretched gentle grassy slopes that led towards steep cliffs overlooking the sea. On clear days, the distant ocean glittered like a vast mirror reflecting the sky.
That was Greg’s world.
The boy loved running through the garden behind the house, his small feet often covered in soil, but his face always bright with delight. Sometimes he tugged at his grandfather’s hand, babbling half words and sounds, asking to be carried closer to the cliff so he could look at the sea. His grandfather usually indulged him, lifting Greg easily in his arms, long used to farm work, allowing the boy to peer down at the strip of sand below where the waves crashed in white foam. Greg liked playing with the sand, and he could sit for hours picking up small shells the tide had washed onto the shore.
Yet what surprised the Lestrade family most was not the boy’s energy, but the way Greg observed the world.
There were afternoons when they would find him sitting quietly in the garden, his knees smeared with dirt, staring intently at a tiny cluster of wildflowers growing near the fence. Greg never plucked them. He simply leaned very close, his brown eyes focused with a strange intensity, then reached out and touched the petals gently as though afraid of hurting them.
At times, he picked up a smooth pebble and turned it between his small fingers. At other times, he would lift a fallen feather from the grass and examine it for a very long while. The colourful butterflies drifting across the garden could also hold Greg’s attention for minutes at a time as he watched them as though they were the most fascinating things in the world.
His father, James Lestrade, had once seen this and burst out laughing.
“That boy’s like a little princess,” he said, folding his arms as he leaned against the back doorway. “Always taken with pretty fragile things like that.”
Next door, the neighbour’s son of the same age was playing in a pile of mud, digging little holes and building a messy model castle out of wet soil. Compared to that child, Greg seemed almost too quiet.
James had barely finished speaking when Daisy, his wife, turned and smacked the back of his head sharply.
“Do not talk about my son like that.”
James rubbed his head and muttered a protest while Daisy snorted. Unlike her husband, she was extremely proud of Greg. The boy was well behaved, rarely cried, and seemed gentler than most boys his age.
James disagreed with that view.
One weekend day, he decided to correct the situation.
He carried Greg out to the fields where the grass grew as high as his knees and crickets and grasshoppers leapt everywhere in the sunlight. James showed his son how to catch insects, how to dig in the soil, and how to run through the grass without worrying about getting dirty.
When the two of them returned late in the afternoon, they both looked as though they had rolled through an entire field of mud.
Greg was filthy from head to toe, his cheeks flushed from wind and laughter. James looked even worse. His shirt was covered in dirt, his hair completely disordered, and in his hand, he still held a glass jar with several crickets inside.
Daisy stood at the kitchen door.
She looked at the two of them.
Then she began scolding.
James was lectured for nearly an entire hour without interruption, while Greg was carried away to be washed clean. As Daisy scrubbed the mud from the boy’s knees, Greg kept giggling, occasionally glancing towards the glass jar on the table where the small cricket was jumping about frantically.
“Oh dear,” Daisy sighed. “Men are truly just children who never grow up.”
That sentence became something of a refrain she repeated all through the following day, while James pretended not to hear a word. In his mind, he had already begun planning how to raise his son into a strong man.
Daisy was entirely unimpressed.
At supper that evening, James was served misshapen, burnt pastries, while Greg was given the most perfect one on the plate.
“Thank you, Mommy,” Greg said in a tiny voice, the familiar well-behaved smile appearing on his round face.
Daisy cast her husband a glance as sharp as a knife.
After finishing his meal, Greg wiped his hands on his trousers in the careless manner of small children and hurried into his bedroom. On the little table beside the window were the glass jars James had brought back from the field. Inside them, a few crickets and grasshoppers clung to the glass walls.
Greg sat down.
The boy studied them very carefully.
Not with the passing curiosity of a child. Greg watched every small movement, his eyes focused with an intensity that was almost serious. It was as though he were memorising each leg, each slender antenna, every motion of the thin wings whenever the cricket jumped.
It was a strange concentration for a two-year-old.
When naptime arrived, Daisy carried Greg to bed. The boy did not protest. He rubbed his eyes once or twice and lay down obediently. Within a few minutes, his breathing had already grown steady.
Greg fell asleep.
And returned to the place he knew so well.
When he opened his eyes, he found himself lying beneath the roots of a small tree. The tree seemed to grow a little larger every year, just as Greg did. Above him, the sky was a clear, gentle blue, without clouds and without strong wind, filled only with soft afternoon light.
This was Greg’s world.
A vast garden stretched around him where wildflowers grew everywhere in brilliant colours. Some were red, yellow or purple, while others held several colours at once, their petals blending shades as though painted with watercolour. Dozens of blue butterflies floated through the air, their wings changing colour whenever the sunlight touched them.
All of this had been created by Greg.
This was the kingdom of his dreams.
The reason Greg had slept so much during his first year was not that he was weak or ill. He simply preferred being here. This place was always quiet, safe, and gentle. There were no anxious adults, no questions he could not yet answer.
There was only a world he could create for himself.
Later, when Greg gradually realised that he could recreate things from the waking world inside his kingdom, the flowers in the garden, the butterflies, the crickets inside the glass jar, he began to grow more curious about the world outside.
Because every new thing he discovered could be brought into his dreams.
He remembered the cricket his father had caught for him.
The image of the cricket in his mind was vague. Long legs, a small brown body, and thin, trembling antennae. Greg brought his small hands together in front of his chest, palms facing each other as though he were holding something invisible.
Between his hands, a faint light began to appear.
At first, it was only a small point of light, like a firefly. But the glow slowly thickened, gathering into a dim shape. Greg opened his eyes and stared closely.
Little by little, the shape of a cricket began to form in his hands.
It was not perfect. Its legs were slightly crooked, its head too round, and the colour looked pale and unfinished, like a painting that had not yet been completed.
Greg frowned.
He tilted his head, studying the tiny creature moving in his palms. It did not quite look like the real cricket he had seen. Something about it was wrong.
Greg thought for a moment.
Then he closed his hands together, and the light vanished immediately. The cricket disappeared with it.
The boy let out a small breath, as though giving up on something not yet finished.
This afternoon, when he woke up, he would look at the cricket in the glass jar again. Next time, he would make it better. When it was done properly, he could release it into this garden so it could leap among the wildflowers and become friends with the butterflies.
Greg stood up and looked around his kingdom.
It was very large, at least for a child. From the base of the tree where he usually sat, the garden stretched far into the distance, filled with endless wildflowers and blue butterflies. Even further away, at the very edge of what he could see, there was a beach and tall white cliffs reaching out towards the sea, just like the cliffs near his home in Somerset.
But he could not reach them. Greg had tried many times.
Whenever he ran towards the beach, a strange sensation would appear, as though the air in front of him had become thick and heavy. There was no wall, yet he could not move any further. It was as though an invisible curtain stood in his way.
Greg stopped at the familiar distance and looked out towards the sea.
Then he turned his head in the opposite direction.
There was another land there.
A place completely different from his garden. A place with no flowers, no butterflies, no bright light.
It was simply an empty stretch of ground resting in cool, quiet shadow. The earth there was smooth, as though nothing had ever grown upon it. The air felt so still that it was almost hollow. Greg had seen that place for a very long time, yet he could not approach it either.
Between the two lands, there was another invisible barrier, just like the one near the beach. He could see it, but he could not cross it.
Greg stood upon the small rise where his tree grew.
On the opposite side, beyond the empty space, there was another rise exactly like it. But nothing grew there.
It was simply a bare mound of earth.
Greg did not understand why, but whenever he looked towards that place, he felt something very clearly.
That one day, a tree would grow there.
He did not know why he thought so.
But Greg remained standing there, gazing towards that quiet darkness with a vague sense of anticipation.