The Bang and the Clatter (20/36)
Jul. 11th, 2013 10:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
earlgreytea68Title - The Bang and the Clatter (20/36)
Author -![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
earlgreytea68
Rating - Teen
Characters - John, Sherlock, Moriarty
Spoilers - Through "The Reichenbach Fall"
Disclaimer - I don't own them and I don't make money off of them, but I don't like to dwell on that, so let's move on.
Summary - Sherlock Holmes is a pitcher and John Watson is a catcher. No, no, no, it's a baseball AU.
Author's Notes - Many, many thanks to arctacuda, for helping with the writing and for uncomplainingly beta-ing when I whine.
Chapter One - Chapter Two - Chapter Three - Chapter Four - Chapter Five - Chapter Six - Chapter Seven - Chapter Eight - Chapter Nine - Chapter Ten - Chapter Eleven - Chapter Twelve - Chapter Thirteen - Chapter Fourteen - Chapter Fifteen - Chapter Sixteen - Chapter Seventeen - Chapter Eighteen - Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
John slept, because John slept every night; Sherlock found it incredibly boring. Sherlock lay awake next to him and watched him sleep and marveled at the level of trust involved in sleeping with another human being. And John had given that trust to him. You’re mine, John had told him and had clearly meant it, meant it with a certainty that dazzled Sherlock, made him have to squeeze his eyes shut and count to ten just to prove that he could still do something as simple as count, that John hadn’t swept every single thing out of his mind palace with that one proclamation. You’re mine, and Sherlock had mentally handed him the keys and said, There you go. Run of the place.
Eventually, Sherlock got out of bed, showered, and dressed. He chose the plum shirt on the theory that it was John’s favorite, so it might also be John’s parents’ favorite. Then he left John still soundly sleeping and walked out into the living area and ordered up an enormous room service breakfast, a little bit of everything on the menu, and a pot of coffee and a pot of tea. It arrived only a few minutes before the knock on the door Sherlock had been expecting. Sherlock took a deep breath and glanced briefly at himself in the mirror on the opposite wall, tousling his hair over his forehead a bit more dramatically, before walking over to answer the knock.
John had his mother’s eyes and his father’s mouth.
“Hello,” Sherlock said to them, as pleasantly as he thought he’d ever said anything in his life. “Won’t you come in?” He gestured, falling back on politeness his mother had tried to drill into him as a child and he’d spent a lifetime rebelling against until this odd moment of meeting another man’s parents in his living area while that man slept in his bed in the other room.
John’s parents both looked surprised, which pleased Sherlock, because he knew they had been expecting to surprise him, and he was always satisfied when he turned the tables on people. It was part of why he loved John so desperately, because he could seldom accomplish it when it came to him.
John’s parents walked in and looked at the small feast Sherlock had had arranged over the suite’s dining area. Then they looked back at Sherlock, startled.
It was John’s mother who spoke. “You were expecting us.”
“I suspected,” Sherlock replied, smoothly. “John has a love of immediate confrontation as well.”
There was a moment of silence, and then John’s mother held her hand out formally. “I’m Fiona,” she said, and Sherlock had the impression this was a stamp of approval from her. “And this is my husband, Rob.”
“Sherlock Holmes,” said Sherlock in response, even though he knew it was unnecessary. “Please have a seat. Hopefully there will be something to your liking.”
John’s father was staring at the food. “Did you order everything on the menu?”
“Yes,” answered Sherlock, briefly. “Tea or coffee?”
“Tea, of course,” said Fiona.
“Bless you for ordering coffee,” said Rob.
Sherlock poured for each of them and nudged their mugs across the table, then poured tea for himself and took a croissant he did not intend to eat, simply to have something to do with his hands.
“He should have brought you to dinner,” Fiona said. “Don’t think I didn’t scold him for that.”
“That was his choice,” said Sherlock.
“He was being rude. I do hope he apologized.”
“He did, but it wasn’t necessary.” Sherlock wished they would stop talking about dinner. He wished they would start talking about anything else. What did people talk about with parents? He tended to simply insult his parents. He didn’t really want to start insulting John’s parents.
“Where are you from?” Rob asked.
“London,” answered Sherlock, thinking, Oh, of course, people must talk about things like this with parents. “And you’re from here.”
“Originally, yes.”
“Your accent isn’t quite…” Fiona trailed off. “I know it’s been a while since I lived at home, but…”
“Harrow,” explained Sherlock, shortly, but, to his relief, Fiona had no reaction to that other than to nod.
“Your family here for the All-Star Game?” asked Rob.
“No,” answered Sherlock.
“Why not?”
“Because they’re not from Boston,” Sherlock noted.
Rob looked confused.
“He means they don’t care about baseball,” Fiona told him.
“What does that have to do with it?” asked Rob.
“Are you nervous about the start tomorrow?” asked Fiona.
Sherlock thought John was more like Fiona than Rob. Physically, he resembled Rob more strongly, but personality-wise Sherlock saw much more of John in Fiona. “No. I am never nervous about baseball.”
“It’s just math,” said Rob.
Sherlock looked at him in pleased surprise. “Exactly.”
“Something John said to me last night. That you’re the science side, and he’s the poetry side.”
“Yes, John talks about baseball entirely in clichés. I blame you for that.”
For some reason, Fiona seemed to think that was hilarious and collapsed into laughter. Rob frowned at her.
“He’s right, though, Rob,” she gasped. “That is how you talk about it. I mean, it’s just a bloody ball and a bloody bat.” Fiona looked across at Sherlock, those dark blue eyes that so resembled John’s twinkling at him, as if they were now secret conspirators in a club of British People Forced to Deal with Baseball Lovers. “You are delightful.”
Sherlock normally tried to conceal whenever someone shocked him, but he couldn’t help it. He blinked and heard himself say, “That is something no one has ever said to me before.”
“Not even John? How thoroughly stupid of all of them. Rob, go and fetch us a newspaper.”
“You already read the newspaper this morning, Fiona.”
“Rob, go and leave us alone so I can intimidate Sherlock about dating our son.”
Rob sighed heavily but stood and exited the room.
Sherlock looked at Fiona warily, assessing the odds that he was about to be excoriated and whether he should employ harsh methods in response.
Fiona caught him off-guard by saying, “Sherlock. It’s an unusual name.”
“Family name,” said Sherlock.
“I looked you up on the Internet last night. Do you know your name means ‘bright hair’?” Fiona’s eyes moved up to his dark curls.
“Yes, well, just the first way in which I disappointed my parents,” replied Sherlock, stiffly.
Fiona looked at him. “John’s absolutely right about you.”
“In what way?”
“When John was five years old, he found an old cloak of my grandmother’s that I had in the attic. It was black velvet, an old-fashioned opera cloak, very dramatic from an adult’s point of view, never mind a child’s. John decided the cloak was magic. John decided, with the aid of that cloak, he was positive he could fly. He leapt out of a tree and broke his leg.”
“His leg,” Sherlock repeated, slotting psychosomatic injury into callback to an old injury that no longer exists in his head.
“I had this curious, risk-taking little boy. And he fell out of a tree one day and he…stopped jumping out of trees. John’s natural inclination is to jump out of trees all over the place, but he never lets himself. He does exactly what he knows he’s supposed to do, exactly what everyone expects him to do. I never intended for him to learn that lesson. He taught it to himself, and, once taught, I didn’t know how to unteach it. You are the first tree I’ve seen him leap out of in thirty years. So he must have decided at some point that you’d be worth the broken leg.”
Sherlock knew most of this about John’s personality. John thrived on taking risks and seldom let himself do it. John, left to his own devices, chose the safe path and made himself miserable. John needed prodding. Sherlock had figured that out almost immediately. But it still made him uncomfortable to have it pointed out that it wasn’t Sherlock prodding John to take risks, Sherlock himself was the risk. Sherlock cleared his throat and said, “Is this the ‘don’t break his heart’ speech?”
“God, no. It was going to be, but now that I’ve met you I can see very clearly that you wouldn’t. So this is a different speech.” Fiona leaned forward and took Sherlock’s hand. Sherlock was too startled to do anything more than gape at her. “If he breaks your heart, you come tell me and I’ll talk sense into him. Sometimes Watsons are idiots who don’t know how to get what they want. You should have seen how long it took me to get Rob to bloody kiss me, never mind marry me. You make him happy. I won’t let him think himself out of that.”
Sherlock stared at Fiona and thought that the poor woman had everything entirely mixed-up and wrong. Normally he didn’t disabuse people of their delusions but he felt compelled to do it when it was John’s mother. “I’m not sure I’m quite as good for him as you think.”
“Sorry,” said Fiona, mildly but with a trace of steel underneath. “But did you know him before you met him?”
Sherlock considered that. It sounded like a riddle. “No,” he answered, slowly.
“No. And I did. So I think I’m the authority on whether or not you’re good for him.” Fiona let go of his hand and leaned back in her chair. “Are you going to eat that croissant?”
Sherlock looked down at it. He hadn’t touched it. “I don’t think so.”
“Can I have it?”
Sherlock offered it across a bit dazedly.
Fiona bit into it with relish.
And that was when John walked into the living area, yawning and ruffling his hair and saying, “Did you order—Mum.”
“Good morning,” said Fiona, and took another enthusiastic bite of the croissant.
John looked at Sherlock, then turned around without another word and disappeared back into the bedroom.
“Please go and tell him how nice I was to you, and also that I expect to see the two of you for lunch before the Home Run Derby.” Fiona stood and then made Sherlock even further off-kilter by leaning down to kiss his cheek. Sherlock really could do nothing in reaction but watch her walk out of the suite.
John must have heard the door close, because he came marching out into the living area. He’d pulled jeans on, although he hadn’t bothered to comb his hair at all.
“What was that?” he demanded, and gestured to the door his mother had just exited through.
“I knew they would try to catch us off-guard this morning.”
“How did you know that?”
“Because it’s something you would do. You like having people off-guard.”
“Well, so do you,” retorted John.
“I didn’t say it was a bad characteristic of yours,” Sherlock pointed out.
“Why didn’t you tell me you thought this was going to happen?”
“I wanted to get through it by myself. I didn’t want your…expectations on it.”
“You could have told me that; I would have respected that.”
Sherlock just looked at him.
“All right, fine,” John allowed. “But you could have warned me. I walked right out here.”
“You weren’t naked.”
“I was wearing your dressing gown.”
“You weren’t naked,” Sherlock repeated.
John sighed and sat in the chair his mother had just vacated. “What did she say to you?”
“That I’m to tell her if you break my heart so she can have words with you.”
“Did you tell her I’m not going to break your heart?”
“I told her you snore,” said Sherlock.
“But I don’t,” insisted John, and then looked at the food spread on the table. “Did you order everything on the menu?”
“Yes.”
John laughed and said, “Well, I suppose I may as well have some French toast, then.”
***
“I could,” remarked Sherlock, leaning back on the grass, propping himself up on his elbows, “predict the outcome of every single pitch.”
John shook his head, chuckling. “No, you couldn’t.” They had sequestered themselves at the edge of the viewing area for the Home Run Derby. The view wasn’t the best, but it was less crowded, and John knew Sherlock would have preferred to skip the event altogether and was only there because John wanted to see it, so John was being nice to him with the more secluded viewing position. Players had come up to exchange pleasantries with John and conspicuously drop hints about being introduced to Sherlock. Sherlock had lain on his back on the grass with a baseball cap pointedly over his face, so John had let him be and accepted everyone’s congratulations. With the event finally getting underway, though, most people had settled into viewing positions away from where Sherlock and John were, flanked by children and television cameras. John was aware there was a camera trained on him and Sherlock. He had tried to get away from it, but they were the starting pitcher-catcher team, Sherlock had an enormous and devoted following, and there was endless curiosity about their relationship. There was no way John could entirely get them away from the camera’s glare, so he was just going to have to guard his reactions to Sherlock.
It was going to be harder than usual, because John was in a spectacular mood. Lunch with his family had gone well. Whatever Sherlock had done at breakfast that morning had completely won his parents over. And Sherlock had taken one look at Harry and seemed to relax a bit, which made John think that Harry really was making an effort. All in all, John could not have imagined a better day. And the icing on the cake was that Sherlock was in a good mood, too. More relaxed than John had ever seen him in public, really. John looked at him, lounging on the grass, eyes hidden behind sunglasses, his baseball cap next to him so that it wouldn’t ruin his hair, and thought he looked content and comfortable and good enough to eat. The only thing, John thought, which could possibly improve this moment would have been the ability for him to crawl onto Sherlock and kiss him.
“All right,” said John, looking away from Sherlock and back to the batter so that it wouldn’t be obvious to all the viewers at home that he really wanted to be watching the Home Run Derby from Sherlock’s lap. “Tell me the outcome of the next pitch.”
“It’s going to be an out,” responded Sherlock, lazily.
It was. John looked at Sherlock, who was back to sprawling on his back. He’d pushed his sunglasses up to perch in his thicket of hair and his eyes were closed. “You’re not even looking,” John accused.
“What makes you think I have to look to be able to predict the outcome?” asked Sherlock, without opening his eyes.
“Well, that’s as much as you know, because that was a home run,” John lied.
Sherlock’s lips curved into a smile. More of a smirk, really. Smug and self-satisfied. It was the same way he looked after 307 seconds in bed, right before John wiped it off his face, of course. “Liar,” said Sherlock. “You think I wouldn’t be able to tell immediately from the noise level in the stadium?”
John wanted him with an ache that was painfully slicing. John picked a few blades of grass and threw them at Sherlock to keep from kissing that bloody stupid smirk of his. They landed on Sherlock’s face, and he shook his head a bit in reaction to shake them off, his smile widening into a grin.
“Good aim,” he said.
“That was my fastball grip,” John told him.
“Poor velocity, John, you’d be hit out of the park. The way the next pitch is going to be.”
There was a sharp crack of the bat, and John watched the ball arc its way out of the stadium. He turned more fully toward Sherlock, tugging up a fistful of grass as he did so. “Lucky guess,” he said.
“I never guess.”
“Yes, you do.” John opened his fist over Sherlock’s face, fluttering blades of grass over him.
Sherlock laughed, pushing grass out of his mouth as he did so. John felt pleased. He was always pleased when he made Sherlock laugh. And making him laugh in public was so rare that John wasn’t sure he’d ever accomplished it before. Sherlock must be very happy indeed. John wanted to bottle it up, wanted to keep him like this forever.
“Why, look who it is: the inseparable Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson.”
John had been looking down at Sherlock, so he saw immediately the reaction the comment provoked in Sherlock. It wasn’t just tension entering his body, it was…preparedness. John turned in annoyance, ready to punch whoever had showed up and destroyed the languid and alluring Sherlock Holmes he had just been admiring.
“Jim Moriarty,” said the baseball player looming over him, blocking the sun so that John could barely make out his silhouette and had to squint at him. “Hi.” He sing-songed the word in a way that put John immediately on edge.
“Did you want something?” Sherlock asked. John knew he was affecting boredom but his voice was sharp and tight nonetheless.
John looked at him. He’d sat up next to him and pulled his sunglasses down out of his hair, back over his eyes.
“Don’t I always?” asked Moriarty, and John, his eyes adjusting to the brightness behind Moriarty, saw the grin that twisted his features. It was not a pleasant grin. The grin was directed at John, but there was something about Moriarty’s attitude toward Sherlock, something John couldn’t put his finger on, that made John shift just slightly, putting himself between Sherlock and Moriarty a little more overtly. “Look at you,” said Moriarty. “Not at all what I expected.” He turned to Sherlock. “Really, Sherlock? Someone so ordinary?” Moriarty shook his head, full of mock sorrow. “And I thought we had such a special something.” Moriarty looked back at John. “Then again, there’s a way in which ordinary people can be adorable. Maybe I should get myself a live-in one like you.”
“What is this about?” asked Sherlock, sounding less bored now, even sharper and tighter than before.
John looked between them, utterly lost.
“It’d be so funny,” mused Moriarty, still studying John’s face.
“What do you want?” demanded Sherlock.
“Can you stop talking about me like I’m not here, please?” John requested, losing his temper, because Sherlock had been very happy and now Sherlock decidedly wasn’t, and John wasn’t inclined to be forgiving of Moriarty for that.
Moriarty crouched, which put his face on level with John’s and saved John the effort of squinting into the sun to see him. John found himself looking into dark eyes that seemed bottomless and completely empty. John thought it possible he’d preferred the squinting. Moriarty’s eyes bored into his. “You’ve shown your hand, Doctor Watson,” Moriarty said.
“Do you have a point?” asked John, shortly. “If not, by all means, stand here with your back to the field like that, I’m rooting for a ball to hit the back of your skull.”
Moriarty looked at him and smiled, one corner of his mouth tipping up. John didn’t like the smile.
Neither, it was clear, did Sherlock, because Sherlock leaned over, putting himself directly between John and Moriarty, and said, in a tone of voice closer to a snarl than anything else, “Go.”
John had tipped back a bit to make room for Sherlock. He looked at Moriarty around Sherlock’s head. Moriarty had turned his unpleasant smile onto Sherlock. “People do get so sentimental about their pets,” Moriarty remarked, and then stood up. “Ciao, Sherlock Holmes,” he said, casually, as if that had not been the strangest conversation John had ever seen two people have.
“Catch you later,” Sherlock replied, with an admirable effort toward breeziness.
John watched Moriarty walk away. No one else had really seemed to be paying attention to the encounter. On the field, whoever was batting hit into another out. John looked at Sherlock, who was still crowded into his personal space, looking narrow-eyed after Moriarty. “What the hell, Sherlock?”
“Doesn’t matter,” said Sherlock, briskly.
“Sherlock—”
“Doesn’t matter,” Sherlock repeated, and picked himself up off the ground, brushing grass off himself.
“No, Sherlock—” John watched Sherlock stride away after Moriarty. “Hey!” John called after him, but Sherlock didn’t turn around, and John didn’t want to attract any more curious looks than they already were. He frowned and sighed and rubbed a hand over his face in frustration.
On the field, the batter hit a home run.
***
Sherlock followed Moriarty swiftly, dodging through the baseball players sprawled on the grass, until Moriarty finally turned around to face him at the entrance to the press tunnel. Moriarty was getting ready to drawl something in that disinterested way he had and was clearly not expecting Sherlock to slap both of his hands onto the wall on either side of Moriarty’s shoulders, trapping him. Sherlock had surprised Moriarty before, in the bar at the All-Star Game the year before, with Moran, and it was always a satisfying thing to do.
Moriarty blinked, and then recovered, looking amused. “Oh my.”
“If you do anything to him, anything at all, I will absolutely destroy you,” Sherlock told him, calmly, a simple fact.
Moriarty’s eyebrows lifted. “You? No, you won’t. Not you. You’re on the side of the angels, of the ordinary people like little John Watson. You could be so great, and you’ve chosen to be boring.”
“I may be on the side of the angels, but don’t think for one second that I am one of them.”
Moriarty stared at him. He blinked slowly. The amusement faded from his face. He inhaled to say something but Sherlock cut him off.
“Leave John out of it.”
“The way you left Moran out of it?”
“That was your own stupidity, putting him in the line of fire like that. This is about the two of us. This has always been about the two of us.”
“Well, of course. Everyone else, Sherlock, everyone else on the planet, that’s all just collateral damage.”
“People are going to get hurt.”
“That’s what people do!” Moriarty suddenly shouted at him.
The people standing closest to them looked at them curiously.
Sherlock dropped his hands from the wall, straightened, said mildly, “Tell Sebastian I said hello,” which contorted Moriarty’s features into predictable fury.
Moriarty closed his hands into fists. “I will burn the heart out of you,” he threatened, his voice low with intense rage.
Sherlock regarded him for a second impassively, then turned and swept his way out of the tunnel. The press was everywhere, all around him, focused on the Home Run Derby, but several looked his way anyway because he was Sherlock Holmes and that was how things went. Sherlock turned to the nearest player, not even sure who it was. Someone who knew who he was, surely, and that was the most important thing.
“I was just talking to Jim Moriarty,” confided Sherlock, his voice louder than necessary but his head tipped as if he were imparting a great secret. All around him, he could sense reporters leaning toward him.
The player he was talking to blinked at him in obvious surprise. “I…oh?” he offered.
“And he was saying that his arm was giving him trouble. He’s not sure if he’s available for tomorrow. Such a shame, isn’t it?”
The player looked shocked. “Really?”
Sherlock turned and left the field, left the stadium entirely.
Next Chapter
Author -
earlgreytea68Rating - Teen
Characters - John, Sherlock, Moriarty
Spoilers - Through "The Reichenbach Fall"
Disclaimer - I don't own them and I don't make money off of them, but I don't like to dwell on that, so let's move on.
Summary - Sherlock Holmes is a pitcher and John Watson is a catcher. No, no, no, it's a baseball AU.
Author's Notes - Many, many thanks to arctacuda, for helping with the writing and for uncomplainingly beta-ing when I whine.
Chapter One - Chapter Two - Chapter Three - Chapter Four - Chapter Five - Chapter Six - Chapter Seven - Chapter Eight - Chapter Nine - Chapter Ten - Chapter Eleven - Chapter Twelve - Chapter Thirteen - Chapter Fourteen - Chapter Fifteen - Chapter Sixteen - Chapter Seventeen - Chapter Eighteen - Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
John slept, because John slept every night; Sherlock found it incredibly boring. Sherlock lay awake next to him and watched him sleep and marveled at the level of trust involved in sleeping with another human being. And John had given that trust to him. You’re mine, John had told him and had clearly meant it, meant it with a certainty that dazzled Sherlock, made him have to squeeze his eyes shut and count to ten just to prove that he could still do something as simple as count, that John hadn’t swept every single thing out of his mind palace with that one proclamation. You’re mine, and Sherlock had mentally handed him the keys and said, There you go. Run of the place.
Eventually, Sherlock got out of bed, showered, and dressed. He chose the plum shirt on the theory that it was John’s favorite, so it might also be John’s parents’ favorite. Then he left John still soundly sleeping and walked out into the living area and ordered up an enormous room service breakfast, a little bit of everything on the menu, and a pot of coffee and a pot of tea. It arrived only a few minutes before the knock on the door Sherlock had been expecting. Sherlock took a deep breath and glanced briefly at himself in the mirror on the opposite wall, tousling his hair over his forehead a bit more dramatically, before walking over to answer the knock.
John had his mother’s eyes and his father’s mouth.
“Hello,” Sherlock said to them, as pleasantly as he thought he’d ever said anything in his life. “Won’t you come in?” He gestured, falling back on politeness his mother had tried to drill into him as a child and he’d spent a lifetime rebelling against until this odd moment of meeting another man’s parents in his living area while that man slept in his bed in the other room.
John’s parents both looked surprised, which pleased Sherlock, because he knew they had been expecting to surprise him, and he was always satisfied when he turned the tables on people. It was part of why he loved John so desperately, because he could seldom accomplish it when it came to him.
John’s parents walked in and looked at the small feast Sherlock had had arranged over the suite’s dining area. Then they looked back at Sherlock, startled.
It was John’s mother who spoke. “You were expecting us.”
“I suspected,” Sherlock replied, smoothly. “John has a love of immediate confrontation as well.”
There was a moment of silence, and then John’s mother held her hand out formally. “I’m Fiona,” she said, and Sherlock had the impression this was a stamp of approval from her. “And this is my husband, Rob.”
“Sherlock Holmes,” said Sherlock in response, even though he knew it was unnecessary. “Please have a seat. Hopefully there will be something to your liking.”
John’s father was staring at the food. “Did you order everything on the menu?”
“Yes,” answered Sherlock, briefly. “Tea or coffee?”
“Tea, of course,” said Fiona.
“Bless you for ordering coffee,” said Rob.
Sherlock poured for each of them and nudged their mugs across the table, then poured tea for himself and took a croissant he did not intend to eat, simply to have something to do with his hands.
“He should have brought you to dinner,” Fiona said. “Don’t think I didn’t scold him for that.”
“That was his choice,” said Sherlock.
“He was being rude. I do hope he apologized.”
“He did, but it wasn’t necessary.” Sherlock wished they would stop talking about dinner. He wished they would start talking about anything else. What did people talk about with parents? He tended to simply insult his parents. He didn’t really want to start insulting John’s parents.
“Where are you from?” Rob asked.
“London,” answered Sherlock, thinking, Oh, of course, people must talk about things like this with parents. “And you’re from here.”
“Originally, yes.”
“Your accent isn’t quite…” Fiona trailed off. “I know it’s been a while since I lived at home, but…”
“Harrow,” explained Sherlock, shortly, but, to his relief, Fiona had no reaction to that other than to nod.
“Your family here for the All-Star Game?” asked Rob.
“No,” answered Sherlock.
“Why not?”
“Because they’re not from Boston,” Sherlock noted.
Rob looked confused.
“He means they don’t care about baseball,” Fiona told him.
“What does that have to do with it?” asked Rob.
“Are you nervous about the start tomorrow?” asked Fiona.
Sherlock thought John was more like Fiona than Rob. Physically, he resembled Rob more strongly, but personality-wise Sherlock saw much more of John in Fiona. “No. I am never nervous about baseball.”
“It’s just math,” said Rob.
Sherlock looked at him in pleased surprise. “Exactly.”
“Something John said to me last night. That you’re the science side, and he’s the poetry side.”
“Yes, John talks about baseball entirely in clichés. I blame you for that.”
For some reason, Fiona seemed to think that was hilarious and collapsed into laughter. Rob frowned at her.
“He’s right, though, Rob,” she gasped. “That is how you talk about it. I mean, it’s just a bloody ball and a bloody bat.” Fiona looked across at Sherlock, those dark blue eyes that so resembled John’s twinkling at him, as if they were now secret conspirators in a club of British People Forced to Deal with Baseball Lovers. “You are delightful.”
Sherlock normally tried to conceal whenever someone shocked him, but he couldn’t help it. He blinked and heard himself say, “That is something no one has ever said to me before.”
“Not even John? How thoroughly stupid of all of them. Rob, go and fetch us a newspaper.”
“You already read the newspaper this morning, Fiona.”
“Rob, go and leave us alone so I can intimidate Sherlock about dating our son.”
Rob sighed heavily but stood and exited the room.
Sherlock looked at Fiona warily, assessing the odds that he was about to be excoriated and whether he should employ harsh methods in response.
Fiona caught him off-guard by saying, “Sherlock. It’s an unusual name.”
“Family name,” said Sherlock.
“I looked you up on the Internet last night. Do you know your name means ‘bright hair’?” Fiona’s eyes moved up to his dark curls.
“Yes, well, just the first way in which I disappointed my parents,” replied Sherlock, stiffly.
Fiona looked at him. “John’s absolutely right about you.”
“In what way?”
“When John was five years old, he found an old cloak of my grandmother’s that I had in the attic. It was black velvet, an old-fashioned opera cloak, very dramatic from an adult’s point of view, never mind a child’s. John decided the cloak was magic. John decided, with the aid of that cloak, he was positive he could fly. He leapt out of a tree and broke his leg.”
“His leg,” Sherlock repeated, slotting psychosomatic injury into callback to an old injury that no longer exists in his head.
“I had this curious, risk-taking little boy. And he fell out of a tree one day and he…stopped jumping out of trees. John’s natural inclination is to jump out of trees all over the place, but he never lets himself. He does exactly what he knows he’s supposed to do, exactly what everyone expects him to do. I never intended for him to learn that lesson. He taught it to himself, and, once taught, I didn’t know how to unteach it. You are the first tree I’ve seen him leap out of in thirty years. So he must have decided at some point that you’d be worth the broken leg.”
Sherlock knew most of this about John’s personality. John thrived on taking risks and seldom let himself do it. John, left to his own devices, chose the safe path and made himself miserable. John needed prodding. Sherlock had figured that out almost immediately. But it still made him uncomfortable to have it pointed out that it wasn’t Sherlock prodding John to take risks, Sherlock himself was the risk. Sherlock cleared his throat and said, “Is this the ‘don’t break his heart’ speech?”
“God, no. It was going to be, but now that I’ve met you I can see very clearly that you wouldn’t. So this is a different speech.” Fiona leaned forward and took Sherlock’s hand. Sherlock was too startled to do anything more than gape at her. “If he breaks your heart, you come tell me and I’ll talk sense into him. Sometimes Watsons are idiots who don’t know how to get what they want. You should have seen how long it took me to get Rob to bloody kiss me, never mind marry me. You make him happy. I won’t let him think himself out of that.”
Sherlock stared at Fiona and thought that the poor woman had everything entirely mixed-up and wrong. Normally he didn’t disabuse people of their delusions but he felt compelled to do it when it was John’s mother. “I’m not sure I’m quite as good for him as you think.”
“Sorry,” said Fiona, mildly but with a trace of steel underneath. “But did you know him before you met him?”
Sherlock considered that. It sounded like a riddle. “No,” he answered, slowly.
“No. And I did. So I think I’m the authority on whether or not you’re good for him.” Fiona let go of his hand and leaned back in her chair. “Are you going to eat that croissant?”
Sherlock looked down at it. He hadn’t touched it. “I don’t think so.”
“Can I have it?”
Sherlock offered it across a bit dazedly.
Fiona bit into it with relish.
And that was when John walked into the living area, yawning and ruffling his hair and saying, “Did you order—Mum.”
“Good morning,” said Fiona, and took another enthusiastic bite of the croissant.
John looked at Sherlock, then turned around without another word and disappeared back into the bedroom.
“Please go and tell him how nice I was to you, and also that I expect to see the two of you for lunch before the Home Run Derby.” Fiona stood and then made Sherlock even further off-kilter by leaning down to kiss his cheek. Sherlock really could do nothing in reaction but watch her walk out of the suite.
John must have heard the door close, because he came marching out into the living area. He’d pulled jeans on, although he hadn’t bothered to comb his hair at all.
“What was that?” he demanded, and gestured to the door his mother had just exited through.
“I knew they would try to catch us off-guard this morning.”
“How did you know that?”
“Because it’s something you would do. You like having people off-guard.”
“Well, so do you,” retorted John.
“I didn’t say it was a bad characteristic of yours,” Sherlock pointed out.
“Why didn’t you tell me you thought this was going to happen?”
“I wanted to get through it by myself. I didn’t want your…expectations on it.”
“You could have told me that; I would have respected that.”
Sherlock just looked at him.
“All right, fine,” John allowed. “But you could have warned me. I walked right out here.”
“You weren’t naked.”
“I was wearing your dressing gown.”
“You weren’t naked,” Sherlock repeated.
John sighed and sat in the chair his mother had just vacated. “What did she say to you?”
“That I’m to tell her if you break my heart so she can have words with you.”
“Did you tell her I’m not going to break your heart?”
“I told her you snore,” said Sherlock.
“But I don’t,” insisted John, and then looked at the food spread on the table. “Did you order everything on the menu?”
“Yes.”
John laughed and said, “Well, I suppose I may as well have some French toast, then.”
***
“I could,” remarked Sherlock, leaning back on the grass, propping himself up on his elbows, “predict the outcome of every single pitch.”
John shook his head, chuckling. “No, you couldn’t.” They had sequestered themselves at the edge of the viewing area for the Home Run Derby. The view wasn’t the best, but it was less crowded, and John knew Sherlock would have preferred to skip the event altogether and was only there because John wanted to see it, so John was being nice to him with the more secluded viewing position. Players had come up to exchange pleasantries with John and conspicuously drop hints about being introduced to Sherlock. Sherlock had lain on his back on the grass with a baseball cap pointedly over his face, so John had let him be and accepted everyone’s congratulations. With the event finally getting underway, though, most people had settled into viewing positions away from where Sherlock and John were, flanked by children and television cameras. John was aware there was a camera trained on him and Sherlock. He had tried to get away from it, but they were the starting pitcher-catcher team, Sherlock had an enormous and devoted following, and there was endless curiosity about their relationship. There was no way John could entirely get them away from the camera’s glare, so he was just going to have to guard his reactions to Sherlock.
It was going to be harder than usual, because John was in a spectacular mood. Lunch with his family had gone well. Whatever Sherlock had done at breakfast that morning had completely won his parents over. And Sherlock had taken one look at Harry and seemed to relax a bit, which made John think that Harry really was making an effort. All in all, John could not have imagined a better day. And the icing on the cake was that Sherlock was in a good mood, too. More relaxed than John had ever seen him in public, really. John looked at him, lounging on the grass, eyes hidden behind sunglasses, his baseball cap next to him so that it wouldn’t ruin his hair, and thought he looked content and comfortable and good enough to eat. The only thing, John thought, which could possibly improve this moment would have been the ability for him to crawl onto Sherlock and kiss him.
“All right,” said John, looking away from Sherlock and back to the batter so that it wouldn’t be obvious to all the viewers at home that he really wanted to be watching the Home Run Derby from Sherlock’s lap. “Tell me the outcome of the next pitch.”
“It’s going to be an out,” responded Sherlock, lazily.
It was. John looked at Sherlock, who was back to sprawling on his back. He’d pushed his sunglasses up to perch in his thicket of hair and his eyes were closed. “You’re not even looking,” John accused.
“What makes you think I have to look to be able to predict the outcome?” asked Sherlock, without opening his eyes.
“Well, that’s as much as you know, because that was a home run,” John lied.
Sherlock’s lips curved into a smile. More of a smirk, really. Smug and self-satisfied. It was the same way he looked after 307 seconds in bed, right before John wiped it off his face, of course. “Liar,” said Sherlock. “You think I wouldn’t be able to tell immediately from the noise level in the stadium?”
John wanted him with an ache that was painfully slicing. John picked a few blades of grass and threw them at Sherlock to keep from kissing that bloody stupid smirk of his. They landed on Sherlock’s face, and he shook his head a bit in reaction to shake them off, his smile widening into a grin.
“Good aim,” he said.
“That was my fastball grip,” John told him.
“Poor velocity, John, you’d be hit out of the park. The way the next pitch is going to be.”
There was a sharp crack of the bat, and John watched the ball arc its way out of the stadium. He turned more fully toward Sherlock, tugging up a fistful of grass as he did so. “Lucky guess,” he said.
“I never guess.”
“Yes, you do.” John opened his fist over Sherlock’s face, fluttering blades of grass over him.
Sherlock laughed, pushing grass out of his mouth as he did so. John felt pleased. He was always pleased when he made Sherlock laugh. And making him laugh in public was so rare that John wasn’t sure he’d ever accomplished it before. Sherlock must be very happy indeed. John wanted to bottle it up, wanted to keep him like this forever.
“Why, look who it is: the inseparable Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson.”
John had been looking down at Sherlock, so he saw immediately the reaction the comment provoked in Sherlock. It wasn’t just tension entering his body, it was…preparedness. John turned in annoyance, ready to punch whoever had showed up and destroyed the languid and alluring Sherlock Holmes he had just been admiring.
“Jim Moriarty,” said the baseball player looming over him, blocking the sun so that John could barely make out his silhouette and had to squint at him. “Hi.” He sing-songed the word in a way that put John immediately on edge.
“Did you want something?” Sherlock asked. John knew he was affecting boredom but his voice was sharp and tight nonetheless.
John looked at him. He’d sat up next to him and pulled his sunglasses down out of his hair, back over his eyes.
“Don’t I always?” asked Moriarty, and John, his eyes adjusting to the brightness behind Moriarty, saw the grin that twisted his features. It was not a pleasant grin. The grin was directed at John, but there was something about Moriarty’s attitude toward Sherlock, something John couldn’t put his finger on, that made John shift just slightly, putting himself between Sherlock and Moriarty a little more overtly. “Look at you,” said Moriarty. “Not at all what I expected.” He turned to Sherlock. “Really, Sherlock? Someone so ordinary?” Moriarty shook his head, full of mock sorrow. “And I thought we had such a special something.” Moriarty looked back at John. “Then again, there’s a way in which ordinary people can be adorable. Maybe I should get myself a live-in one like you.”
“What is this about?” asked Sherlock, sounding less bored now, even sharper and tighter than before.
John looked between them, utterly lost.
“It’d be so funny,” mused Moriarty, still studying John’s face.
“What do you want?” demanded Sherlock.
“Can you stop talking about me like I’m not here, please?” John requested, losing his temper, because Sherlock had been very happy and now Sherlock decidedly wasn’t, and John wasn’t inclined to be forgiving of Moriarty for that.
Moriarty crouched, which put his face on level with John’s and saved John the effort of squinting into the sun to see him. John found himself looking into dark eyes that seemed bottomless and completely empty. John thought it possible he’d preferred the squinting. Moriarty’s eyes bored into his. “You’ve shown your hand, Doctor Watson,” Moriarty said.
“Do you have a point?” asked John, shortly. “If not, by all means, stand here with your back to the field like that, I’m rooting for a ball to hit the back of your skull.”
Moriarty looked at him and smiled, one corner of his mouth tipping up. John didn’t like the smile.
Neither, it was clear, did Sherlock, because Sherlock leaned over, putting himself directly between John and Moriarty, and said, in a tone of voice closer to a snarl than anything else, “Go.”
John had tipped back a bit to make room for Sherlock. He looked at Moriarty around Sherlock’s head. Moriarty had turned his unpleasant smile onto Sherlock. “People do get so sentimental about their pets,” Moriarty remarked, and then stood up. “Ciao, Sherlock Holmes,” he said, casually, as if that had not been the strangest conversation John had ever seen two people have.
“Catch you later,” Sherlock replied, with an admirable effort toward breeziness.
John watched Moriarty walk away. No one else had really seemed to be paying attention to the encounter. On the field, whoever was batting hit into another out. John looked at Sherlock, who was still crowded into his personal space, looking narrow-eyed after Moriarty. “What the hell, Sherlock?”
“Doesn’t matter,” said Sherlock, briskly.
“Sherlock—”
“Doesn’t matter,” Sherlock repeated, and picked himself up off the ground, brushing grass off himself.
“No, Sherlock—” John watched Sherlock stride away after Moriarty. “Hey!” John called after him, but Sherlock didn’t turn around, and John didn’t want to attract any more curious looks than they already were. He frowned and sighed and rubbed a hand over his face in frustration.
On the field, the batter hit a home run.
***
Sherlock followed Moriarty swiftly, dodging through the baseball players sprawled on the grass, until Moriarty finally turned around to face him at the entrance to the press tunnel. Moriarty was getting ready to drawl something in that disinterested way he had and was clearly not expecting Sherlock to slap both of his hands onto the wall on either side of Moriarty’s shoulders, trapping him. Sherlock had surprised Moriarty before, in the bar at the All-Star Game the year before, with Moran, and it was always a satisfying thing to do.
Moriarty blinked, and then recovered, looking amused. “Oh my.”
“If you do anything to him, anything at all, I will absolutely destroy you,” Sherlock told him, calmly, a simple fact.
Moriarty’s eyebrows lifted. “You? No, you won’t. Not you. You’re on the side of the angels, of the ordinary people like little John Watson. You could be so great, and you’ve chosen to be boring.”
“I may be on the side of the angels, but don’t think for one second that I am one of them.”
Moriarty stared at him. He blinked slowly. The amusement faded from his face. He inhaled to say something but Sherlock cut him off.
“Leave John out of it.”
“The way you left Moran out of it?”
“That was your own stupidity, putting him in the line of fire like that. This is about the two of us. This has always been about the two of us.”
“Well, of course. Everyone else, Sherlock, everyone else on the planet, that’s all just collateral damage.”
“People are going to get hurt.”
“That’s what people do!” Moriarty suddenly shouted at him.
The people standing closest to them looked at them curiously.
Sherlock dropped his hands from the wall, straightened, said mildly, “Tell Sebastian I said hello,” which contorted Moriarty’s features into predictable fury.
Moriarty closed his hands into fists. “I will burn the heart out of you,” he threatened, his voice low with intense rage.
Sherlock regarded him for a second impassively, then turned and swept his way out of the tunnel. The press was everywhere, all around him, focused on the Home Run Derby, but several looked his way anyway because he was Sherlock Holmes and that was how things went. Sherlock turned to the nearest player, not even sure who it was. Someone who knew who he was, surely, and that was the most important thing.
“I was just talking to Jim Moriarty,” confided Sherlock, his voice louder than necessary but his head tipped as if he were imparting a great secret. All around him, he could sense reporters leaning toward him.
The player he was talking to blinked at him in obvious surprise. “I…oh?” he offered.
“And he was saying that his arm was giving him trouble. He’s not sure if he’s available for tomorrow. Such a shame, isn’t it?”
The player looked shocked. “Really?”
Sherlock turned and left the field, left the stadium entirely.
Next Chapter
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Date: 2013-07-12 03:02 am (UTC)Now I am going to go reread Scotch, which I can just about lipsynch.
I want to go live there.
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Date: 2013-07-27 12:54 am (UTC)And I'm glad you love Scotch so much, too!
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Date: 2013-07-12 03:23 am (UTC)Seriously. WOW.
Also, I am in total love with John's mum!
Plus--ordering everything on the menu--HEE!
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Date: 2013-07-27 12:55 am (UTC)And John's mum can be pretty much the sweetest, can't she?
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Date: 2013-07-12 03:46 am (UTC)And Jim was incredibly creepy and now I want to know their history.
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Date: 2013-07-27 01:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-07-12 08:50 am (UTC)The scene with John’s Mum was brilliantly done – I love her already. She knows her son inside out and, thus, who will be good for him, and that’s definitely Sherlock in her book.
Everything on the menu what a great idea; broke the ice with both parents (and John!) and then left Sherlock in the unusual position of not being able to say anything. That was wonderful to see.
”Sherlock had an enormous and devoted following, and there was endless curiosity about their relationship.”
Wonder where you got that idea? !! *wink*
Moriarty is as chilling as ever; he’s impossible to read but oh-so-dangerous. I’m glad John wasn’t there to see that scene, even though Sherlock does have a bit of revenge by the end.
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Date: 2013-07-27 01:19 am (UTC)And yes, the fic might get a bit meta! :-)
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Date: 2013-07-12 11:54 am (UTC)Well that was quite the turn of events, going from happy, lazy, shmoopy to ... well crazy Jim Moriarty.
“And he was saying that his arm was giving him trouble. He’s not sure if he’s available for tomorrow. Such a shame, isn’t it?”
I see what you did there! Very Doctor-ish. ;D
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Date: 2013-07-13 03:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-07-14 02:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-07-27 02:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-07-27 01:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-07-12 12:11 pm (UTC)I love Fiona, she is fabulous.
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Date: 2013-07-27 01:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-07-12 12:15 pm (UTC)Oh, last week I was visiting my sister in DC and we took our families to a Nationals game. I spent most of the game resisting the urge to check on my phone to see if this had updated, and to reread the parts that had. Just thought you'd like to know that life made me long for art. Cheers!
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Date: 2013-07-27 01:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-07-12 03:15 pm (UTC)Jim creeps me out. Desperately want to know the history there.
As always, a wonderful chapter!
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Date: 2013-07-27 01:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-07-13 03:27 am (UTC)I think - no, scratch that, I know I'm in love with Fiona Watson. Thank God she's in a different universe than my Aurora Holmes; the two of them would end up running the world together, none of the rest of us would stand a chance.
But it was this set of dialog that had me thinking:
First:
“His leg,” Sherlock repeated, slotting psychosomatic injury into callback to an old injury that no longer exists in his head.
And then, just a paragraph later:
You are the first tree I’ve seen him leap out of in thirty years. So he must have decided at some point that you’d be worth the broken leg.
Okay, this might be me overthinking (I do that sometimes, and this was this morning when I was still worried about Cleo), but here's my thought. John, as a kid, jumps out of a tree, takes a leap of faith that he can fly. He can't, and he falls, and he breaks his leg, thus teaching him caution.
Now John's got the limp, entirely psychosomatic. Or at least he had the limp at the beginning of the fic, I can't recall that he's had it in recent chapters. Point is...if, as Sherlock thinks, the limp is a callback to a prior, now-healed injury, and the limp is psychosomatic, it stands the reason that it came back because John acquired it in similar circumstances. In other words: he took a leap of faith, of some sort, and it didn't work.
So here's the question: what was John's leap of faith? What did he think he could do, but couldn't? I don't think it was necessarily moving to a new team in his last year of professional baseball - because clearly, he did that, and it's working out just fine so far. I think it's something else. I even want to say it's something personal to him (like maybe a previous relationship that didn't work).
Or I'm just reading into it. I do that, you know.
Also possibly reading in: Sherlock talking about Moriarty's arm to another player totally strikes me in the same vein as the Doctor's six little words. ("Don't you think she looks tired?") Evil, Sherlock. E-vil.
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Date: 2013-07-27 02:09 am (UTC)Oh, I really like your analysis of John's injury. In my head, it was just that John doubts himself too much. He got a bit older and slowed down a bit and stopped being able to turn on a fastball the same way and then he got in his own head and panicked about becoming obsolete and having to retire and boom! got himself a nervous injury for all his trouble.
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Date: 2013-07-15 01:04 am (UTC)It sounds so Sherlock.
What did people talk about with parents? He tended to simply insult his parents. He didn’t really want to start insulting John’s parents.
*giggles* You said it was difficult for you to find Sherlock's voice, but you really nail it!
“Harrow,” explained Sherlock
What, not Eton? ;-)
“That is something no one has ever said to me before.”
People normally say, "Piss off"!
“Rob, go and leave us alone so I can intimidate Sherlock about dating our son.”
*chuckles* I love Fiona more and more.
It was black velvet, an old-fashioned opera cloak, very dramatic from an adult’s point of view, never mind a child’s. John decided the cloak was magic. John decided, with the aid of that cloak, he was positive he could fly. He leapt out of a tree and broke his leg.
Years later, John decided Sherlock's very dramatic coat was magic. John decided, with the aid of that coat, he was positive he could fly. He leapt out of a roof and kept on running. :-) Also, I love the way you explain the psychosomatic limp, it's really clever.
You are the first tree I’ve seen him leap out of in thirty years. So he must have decided at some point that you’d be worth the broken leg.
Aww. What a lovely and poetic metaphor.
If he breaks your heart, you come tell me and I’ll talk sense into him. Sometimes Watsons are idiots who don’t know how to get what they want.
*looks at you nervously* Must we start angsting over future chapters?
Sherlock stared at Fiona and thought that the poor woman had everything entirely mixed-up and wrong.
The idea that he's the one who has everything entirely mixed-up and wrong doesn't cross his mind, of course.
And that was when John walked into the living area, yawning and ruffling his hair and saying, “Did you order—Mum.”
“Good morning,” said Fiona, and took another enthusiastic bite of the croissant.
John looked at Sherlock, then turned around without another word and disappeared back into the bedroom.
*giggles* You have such a sense of comedy! I can imagine that scene on screen. *thinks about it* Actually I'd like to see much more than that scene of screen. Ahem. Anyway, don't ask me why but it makes me think of something by Capra. Or Cukor. With Cary Grant as Sherlock and James Stewart as John. Yes, I know it sounds like nonsense. (But, hey, I've just compared you to Capra or Cukor so there's that. :D)
John sighed and sat in the chair his mother had just vacated. “What did she say to you?”
“That I’m to tell her if you break my heart so she can have words with you.”
“Did you tell her I’m not going to break your heart?”
“I told her you snore,” said Sherlock.
“But I don’t,” insisted John, and then looked at the food spread on the table.
Er... Just what I said below. :D
Lunch with his family had gone well.
So, did John reward Sherlock with something pretty fantastic? ;-)
his baseball cap next to him so that it wouldn’t ruin his hair
I remember that, in a comment to one of the first chapters, I said you should have choosen a sport in which players are not obliged to wear a hat, for the sake of Sherlock's curls. I'm glad he agrees.
“Jim Moriarty,” said the baseball player looming over him
*gasps* Of course. It went too well. And I was scared of Moran! I'm afraid it's going to be worse...
there was something about Moriarty’s attitude toward Sherlock, something John couldn’t put his finger on, that made John shift just slightly, putting himself between Sherlock and Moriarty a little more overtly
Yay for protective!John.
“And I thought we had such a special something.”
Don't tell me there was something between them? *is horrified*
“If not, by all means, stand here with your back to the field like that, I’m rooting for a ball to hit the back of your skull.”
Well... (http://earlgreytea68.tumblr.com/post/52810517760/not-that-anybody-asked-but-a-baseball-thrown-90)
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Date: 2013-07-15 01:04 am (UTC)Yay for protective!Sherlock too! I like the way they protect each other.
“Catch you later,” Sherlock replied, with an admirable effort toward breeziness.
*exults* In my comment to the first chapter I wondered if Sherlock was actually talking about baseball when he says, "I'll catch you later" to Moriarty at the end of The Great Game, even if he's a pitcher. :D You use the quote brilliantly!
Sherlock had surprised Moriarty before, in the bar at the All-Star Game the year before, with Moran, and it was always a satisfying thing to do.
Will you tell us more about this brawl? I couldn't care less of course, I'm not curious at all, but for John's sake, you see, I'm sure he'd like to know. *coughs*
This is about the two of us. This has always been about the two of us.
Damn. That's very intriguing. What happened between these two? I hope Sherlock will remember that now what matters most is him and John.
“And he was saying that his arm was giving him trouble. He’s not sure if he’s available for tomorrow. Such a shame, isn’t it?”
Is Sherlock going to break Moriarty's arm? Is he going to do something worse?
Sherlock turned and left the field, left the stadium entirely.
Argh the cliffhanger. And he leaves without John. That bodes ill. I hope he's not going to turn away from John because "playing" with Moriarty is so thrilling, or more likely because he thinks that John will be safer without him. I... I think I need to re-read the last chapter of Nature and Nurture. I need fluff. :D
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Date: 2013-07-27 02:38 am (UTC)You know, I'm not sure if I ever describe the brawl more...
N&N is unadulterated fluff, it's true! :-)
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Date: 2013-07-27 02:36 am (UTC)Once Sherlock starts talking, it's hard to get him to stop!
I had to separate this Sherlock out from Eton!Sherlock a little bit. ;-)
Awww, I didn't even think about the similarities between John's opera cloak experience and Sherlock's dramatic coat...
Sherlock is never wrong! ;-)
Awww, thank you for those comparisons! I am wildly flattered!
John will do anything to protect Sherlock. And vice versa.