storypaint (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
storypaint) wrote2014-08-17 04:37 pm
storypaint) wrote2014-08-17 04:37 pm
[Elementary] one fixed point (Joan & Sherlock gen)
Title: one fixed point
Fandom: Elementary
Length: 4370 words
Prompt: Yuletide 2013: The years go by and they stay together, for treble.
Pairing: Joan & Sherlock gen
Other: Minor spoilers for 2x24 The Grand Experiment. There is some implied violence and death, but nothing very detailed.
Excerpt: Sherlock and Joan through the years. Several years pass (regularly interrupted by the four weeks of vacation time Sherlock added to her compensation package). Sherlock doesn't pick the lock to her apartment anymore, not since she called the police last time and Gregson sent someone out to talk to him. The tide goes out, the tide comes back.
After Joan moves out, Sherlock sulks for two days. Then he calls Joan at one a.m. on a Tuesday, babbling on about the color of the suspect's hair and the particular dye she used.
Joan won't admit it, but she kind of missed this. She grumbles to Sherlock for waking her up as she pulls clothes out of her closet, getting dressed with the phone pressed between her shoulder and ear. She slips on her shoes and is running out the door before she realizes how brightly she's smiling.
They solve the case. Two days later, Joan unlocks the door to her apartment and barely bothers to kick off her shoes before she heads to her cool, dark bedroom.
She turns her phone off, which means that Sherlock kicks in the door six hours later in a panic. The frame is irreparably splintered.
"You owe me the cost of my security deposit," she says sourly. Sherlock apologizes, but Joan knows he doesn't mean it; it's the polite kind of apology, rather than an understanding kind. He still thinks he was in the right. As he tells her, completely earnestly, she could have been kidnapped or murdered.
"We're going to talk about this more later," she promises. Sherlock falls asleep on her couch, curled up in a bony little bundle like a child.
*
Joan has made a life out of enforcing boundaries. Sherlock has made a life out of breaking them. It's no wonder that they always come back to arguing about this.
Sherlock pushes and Joan pushes back. When Joan is in a good mood she thinks of it like waves breaking on a beach, continual and soothing. When she isn't, it reminds her more of a game of tug-of-war that she will never win.
She and Mycroft break up after about six months. It's mostly not Sherlock's fault, but he never really does become comfortable with their relationship, and if Joan is honest with herself, she feels a bit of resentment.
There's always the work, and Joan loves the work. But New York is starting to feel small. She needs a vacation. For the first time since she met Sherlock, she feels like she can take one. She ignores his melodrama when she tells him. Ms. Hudson agrees to look in on him an extra time that week, and so do Alfredo and Marcus.
Sherlock doesn't try to prevent her from leaving. He doesn't attempt to get around the apparently-laughable TSA security to go with her, and he doesn't get his friends in Everyone to put her on the no-fly list. She doesn't realize how tense she is until the plane takes off and she sinks back into her seat, sighing so loudly that her seat neighbor looks at her.
She loves Italy -- gelato and cobblestones, and the way the sunset slides across the hills. Sherlock sends her a postcard every day from home, some of his words lost behind the row of international stamps. In any case, he had to have sent them at least a week early so they'd arrive on time, and there isn't much to them. He sends her quotations from Greek philosophers and once, a sketch of Clyde that's quite good. She takes the postcards home with her when she goes.
Sherlock is waiting at the gate. There's been three murders in Queens over the past two days. She wrenches her arm carrying her luggage around until Marcus offers to keep it for her at the station.
It is wonderful and exhilarating and Sherlock gets a scar that bisects the 26.2 on his shoulder. Sherlock tells her a story about the marathon he ran through London in order to catch a serial rapist while she stitches him up.
"I got your postcards," she tells him, her fingers in his skin.
He smiles at her. Joan never quite manages to sign up for the exam.
*
Several years pass (regularly interrupted by the four weeks of vacation time Sherlock added to her compensation package). Sherlock doesn't pick the lock to her apartment anymore, not since she called the police last time and Gregson sent someone out to talk to him. The tide goes out, the tide comes back.
This morning he's waiting for her. When she opens the door, her nose wrinkles with the smell and she nearly shuts it again. Homeless man sleeping on her front step, or maybe an assassin pretending to be one. Neither of them have felt very safe since Moriarty escaped prison. But the source of the smell bounds nimbly to his feet and Joan recognizes her partner's sharp eyes. Some of his more elaborate costumes still fool her, but this is not one of them.
"What did you do, roll in garbage?" she asks.
"Verisimilitude," Sherlock tells her, primly.
She's not going to let him into her apartment smelling like that, but he seems content to follow her down the street, muttering nonsense under his breath and occasionally offering a real piece of information. They have a new case, probably related to the recent escape; he's pretty sure someone is trying to kill him; she would do well to brush up on her disguises. In fact, Joan isn't entirely sure why he's bothering with muttering. No one in New York would listen to or believe what he was saying even without the costume... No one but her, anyway. There's a knot of tension between her shoulders now, where a sniper's bullet could be any second.
Of course, that wouldn't be much like the woman who signs her letters "Jamie" in a careful calligraphic script. Joan has been getting them every Wednesday for the past year. They haven't stopped since the escape, although the postmarks have gotten more interesting.
Joan had been planning to go to the grocery store, but she sees take-out Indian food in her future. She's never been much for cooking, anyway. She has an overnight bag in her trunk and a gun she hasn't told him about locked in her glovebox.
Marcus has taken her to the range a few times, even gotten her the police discount on a membership. She's getting pretty good at shooting paper targets. He tells her every time that it's not at all like shooting a person, and she understands that. She's seen the other side of a shooting more than once, peeled bullets back out of broken flesh and coaxed it toward healing. She doesn't know if she could fire at someone, but she is a big fan of having options.
Sherlock breathes in her ear and she ducks down toward the sidewalk without hesitation, sliding her leg out to trip the man behind them with the hypodermic. He falls heavily onto the needle and she's up and running, Sherlock's hand tight on her arm.
*
They don't stop running until they hit Las Vegas. In a gambling city, Sherlock comes out the loser, or at least that's what she has to assume from the hotel room splattered with blood. It probably isn't enough blood to kill him outright, but when a week goes by and he doesn't turn up in any hospitals within a hundred miles, there isn't much else she can assume. Still, she waits two months, although she moves to a different hotel. They don't find Moriarty's body either.
Mycroft comes to New York and takes her back to London for the funeral. The Holmes lawyer tells her that she has been the primary heir to Sherlock's will for years, ever since she agreed to be his apprentice. He never bothered to tell her. Years later, she'll find the paperwork tucked into the coal scuttle, which was hidden in an upstairs closet. He'd bought the brownstone a couple of years ago. Now it's hers.
Sherlock has a formal funeral he would have hated. Mr. Holmes attends, but doesn't say one word to Joan. He does nod to her as she stands by the empty casket. And he doesn't fight the will. Mycroft tells her that means that his father liked her. Joan suspects it's something more about obligations and imagined debts and not having to worry about his troubled son any longer.
When she goes back to New York they have the real funeral, with Marcus, Gregson, Ms. Hudson, Alfredo and all the other friends and acquaintances they have acquired over their partnership.
This is not what Joan pictured when she thought about moving back into the brownstone. Her room is just how she left it - clean and empty, the extra sheets folded neatly at the bottom of the bed.
She wakes in the night at every shift and creak. The apartment settles.
She never gets another letter from Moriarty.
*
Joan has had a lot of careers, but she hasn't done much writing since freshman composition class. When Ms. Hudson suggests that she write a book, she laughs. She has enough to do between the cases she takes for the department and the ones she takes from the website she maintains now. She finds cats and killers, rescues women and heals old wounds. Sometimes she just listens, and that's enough. The work isn't her life, which is how she wants it. She goes on dates; she goes to the theater. She eats dinner on Thursday nights with her family. Her friends have adjusted to calling her a detective instead of a surgeon. When would she have time for writing?
Still, the idea sticks in her head. Mycroft is in New York for a while doing something he steadfastly refuses to tell her about, but he takes her to dinner one evening and she finds herself telling him the story of her last case with Sherlock, the story she hadn't been ready to tell back then. He's fascinated by the details she can remember. She can't believe it's been a year already.
When she goes home that evening, she starts to write it down, and after that, she tries to carve out a little bit of time in the evenings to work on it. Once she finishes the story of the Reichenbach Hotel, she starts another one. When she has about ten, a friend convinces her to send them to Salon's Life section, although she keeps the one about the hotel. They commission ten more.
Her therapist asks her if she's doing this to help keep Sherlock alive somehow. The therapist has a theory that deaths that don't leave a body are harder on everyone around the deceased, and that actively moving forward is very important. Joan thinks about it, running through the park each morning, enjoying the white curdle of her breath in the air.
There are a dozen different answers she can think of. To hone her observational skills - that would amuse Sherlock. Because people should know what they did, what she still does. Because she wants to make sure she remembers him properly. Because she realizes that she actually really likes writing.
She misses her next therapy appointment because she's solving a cryptic message someone left on a client's doorstep, and the therapist doesn't bring it up again.
*
Three years after Sherlock's death, a woman shows up on the doorstep of the brownstone with a thin volume tucked under her arm. She dances on the step like she has to go to the bathroom, tall and willowy, in a dark brown peacoat and black boots.
Joan has an office and a work phone number now, but occasionally people still show up on her doorstep. Generally those are the most interesting cases. They come to her when they don't have anyone else to turn to, brought by word of mouth from someone she likely still corresponds with.
The doorbell rings again while Joan is studying the visitor.
"Ms. Watson? Please, I just want a moment of your time!" the stranger says into the door. She has a breathy voice, a bit hoarse. She leans up on her tiptoes and then back down. She holds the book up to her chest and that's when Joan recognizes it - the book is the first collected volume of Sherlock Holmes stories.
Only a very determined fan would have been able to find her residence. Joan knows she should call Bell or Gregson to make sure that this isn't the wrong kind of determined fan, but she hesitates. She's learned to trust her instincts, and there's something screaming in the back of her mind to pay attention and let the girl in.
She unlocks the door. The woman dances in, curls in her face. She's talking a mile a minute.
"Oh goodness, it really is you! When Sadie told me she had your address, I was like, no way! But you look just like you do on the back of the book! A little older, but that's okay."
Joan mentally revises the woman's age down, but she smiles. "Can I sign that for you?" she says, reaching for the book.
"Please!" the woman says, handing it over with a jangle of bracelets. Joan pats her pockets but can't find a pen. She thinks that there's definitely one in the take-out menu drawer so she turns away for a moment. The young woman is glancing around openly, as if trying to find something magical in Joan's apartment. There's plenty to look at, Angus still at a point of pride on the mantel next to photos of her family. The case board is currently half-empty; she's taking the weekend off after solving a difficult kidnapping, but she leaves up older news articles sometimes in case something catches her eye. It's neater now than when it was Sherlock's apartment, but much of his stuff is still here. She's been cleaning out the upstairs first, trying to figure out what Mycroft might want and where to donate or dispose of the many unlabeled chemical compounds and out-of-date books, among other things even more difficult things to place.
When she turns back to the woman, the wig is gone and Joan Watson hits Sherlock Holmes very hard in the face. He goes down almost before she realizes what she's done, but she can't find herself regretting the impulse too much. There is a scar on her breastbone now that she got a year ago when she hesitated. She carries the gun now when she thinks she might need it, and her folding stick when she isn't sure. She's lucky she got to have her one major mistake without it being her last.
"Could have been a knife," she says, and he groans.
*
Later, they sit across from each other at the battered dining room table. Sherlock didn't complain when she ordered in Thai food, and he's wolfing it down now like he forgot to eat this week. He took off the peacoat to reveal a dress that fit him pretty well, considering what he had to work with. She has given away most of his old clothes but managed to find one remaining box in his old bedroom. He's wearing the green t-shirt he was wearing the day they met, and no shoes on his bony feet. She thinks he's lost weight somehow. His face is thin and there are dark circles under his eyes.
She's still mad. She's never been so furious at him, not since the first night he didn't return to the Reichenbach Hotel. Her rage is mixed with relief and frustration and fear. They've been talking for hours, Sherlock's glee slowly subsiding, Joan's urge to cry rising. Finally she suggested a break for dinner, thinking that raising her blood sugar might help. Sherlock is stroking Clyde's back with the hand not holding his chopsticks. He's gotten a new tattoo on his wrist, but she can't quite tell what it is.
"The dharmic wheel," he says, lifting his arm for her inspection. "I spent some time in Tibet lying low. The monks are very patient."
This isn't what Joan wants to talk about. "Mycroft knew the whole time?" she asks instead, continuing an earlier topic of conversation. She almost feels more betrayed by this fact.
One thing is for sure: the Holmes boys are more like their father than either wishes to admit.
Sherlock answers hesitantly. "It was necessary for someone to make the arrangements. My brother and I don't always get along, but I know I can trust him with my life."
"But not me," she says. He opens his mouth but she keeps going. "Don't say it. Whether or not it's what you meant, no matter how noble your intentions, you still can't treat me like an equal. Like the partner you promised we would be."
She puts down her chopsticks; she hasn't been eating much and it hasn't helped.
"I kept on with it after you left," she says, her throat thick with emotion. "All of these strangers trusted me with their problems and you can't even trust me to help take down someone we'd beaten before!"
She gets up and starts pacing. Sherlock stays still.
"She was going to kidnap your family. To start," he says. "Probably mine as well but yours didn't have bodyguards. She went on a date with Oren, she told me, although he was apparently quite dull compared to you."
His words ring into her sudden silence. Outside New York goes on, honking horns and screaming strangers and someone walking by whistling the theme to Cheers.
"You need to stay somewhere else tonight," Joan says, finally. She still can't forgive him, not yet.
"My br-- I have a place," Sherlock says. He gathers up his disguise and leaves her, the door clicking behind him. She suddenly wants to get up and run to the door, to verify that he's really walking down the street. That he's real.
Instead, she goes up to the roof and talks to the bees. Then she calls her mother, just to hear her voice.
*
Sherlock Holmes's return has far-reaching consequences that neither of them have anticipated. In his absence, she has made him famous -- well, Internet-famous, anyway. Now that he's back, lying low isn't an option. There are a dozen requests for interviews with both of them, and some rude man on Reddit writes a screed about Joan's inability to forgive, based on a few candid photos.
They don't have to consult each other before turning down these requests. They don't talk about them at all. They talk about other things, all the things Sherlock has missed. Joan tells him that Bell got married and Gregson is thinking of retiring, that Ms. Hudson is teaching Greek at a local university and Teddy got his GED. Sherlock listens, mostly. He still looks at her out of the corner of his eye like a man expecting rejection any moment.
He hasn't been reinstated with the department, although Mycroft was at least able to push through the paperwork to reverse his legal death. He finally ends up with a vacation visa to stay in the US, since he's no longer employed. It feels odd to Joan - she's living in his apartment, doing his job. Before it was carrying on a legacy. Now it's taking his place. Probably the worst part is that he's proud of that.
"Of course I knew you'd take over," Sherlock says to her one day. They have short visits at the brownstone; she jokes that it's like sharing custody of the building, sounding more flippant than she feels.
"It's like visitation," Alfredo responds, then. He talks to Sherlock almost as much as she does nowadays. Sponsorship is for life, he tells Joan.
"If you knew I'd step right into your dangerous life, why did you bother with the secrecy?" she snaps, and he is silent.
Eventually the conversation picks up on something else innocuous, but before he leaves that evening, Sherlock knots his scarf around his neck and says, "Because I had to try."
She lets him go.
*
His story comes out in short bits and asides, and it isn't until several years later that she has it all pieced together. The conflict in the hotel room didn't end well. Of course, he knew that Moriarty was waiting for him there. It was the only logical place for her to be. Joan was sent on a wild goose chase in pursuit of a suspect who was in all likelihood one of Moriarty's agents, and she wouldn't be back in Las Vegas for at least a couple days. If Moriarty wanted Joan out of the way, she was definitely coming for Sherlock.
He would be easier to take care of, Moriarty said. Then she told him her plans for Joan's family, to make Joan easier to deal with. Sherlock kept her talking as long as he could, but eventually he overstepped and Moriarty drew the gun. He fought for it and the resulting struggle resulted in four shots. Two hit Sherlock and one hit Irene. (Sometimes he slips up and still calls her by that name; Joan never corrects him.) The fourth bullet was recovered at the scene.
Of course, gunshots generally invited attention, even in seedy hotels, but one of Moriarty's lieutenants had smuggled them out; she wanted, she told him, to be sure that he was dead.
"It would probably have been easier to shoot me again, or have someone else do it, but her arm was ruined, and she wouldn't trust it to anyone else," he said. Joan had handed him her smartphone so he could make a call, but he hadn't resisted the opportunity to page through some of her unpublished story drafts, which included Reichenbach. Joan had filled in holes with speculation, but after correcting that statement, he didn't say anything else about it, not then. The rest comes in quiet moments after finished cases or hard, late nights.
Moriarty died before they made it to the safe house. She breathed her last in the front seat of the getaway car. Sherlock was so drunk on blood loss that he hadn't minded being left for dead in a dirty alley by her lieutenant. A local midwife had rescued him, patching him up in her own home when he begged her not to take him to a hospital, and although he had some pointed things to say about her homeopathy when he told the story to Joan later, Joan knew he occasionally helped pay the woman's rent.
Joan never ends up publishing that story, anyway.
*
Eventually it gets easier. They become accustomed to each other again. Sherlock apologizes. She refuses to refer to his missing years as the Great Hiatus. He brings home another turtle so Clyde won't be lonely, and by that point it is his home again too. The new turtle is named Bonnie, of course.
Over the past couple of years he's moved back in. It's hardly noticeable; he had nothing but the clothes on his back when he came back. He buys more clothes from local thrift shops and Joan's mother knits him mittens. He doesn't complain too much that she cleared out most of his most esoteric and dusty things. Others she hung up on the walls for decoration, so really the decluttering is a good thing.
She doesn't move out. The brownstone has become hers in a way it never would have if Sherlock had stayed. She hosts a book club Tuesday nights; she replaced the leaky bathroom faucet a few years back. He fits himself back into her space, and that chafes a lot less.
They solve cases, both together and separately. They argue about whose turn it is to clean the bathroom. Joan almost gets married once, but it doesn't work out in the end. Sherlock still brings people home and puts up polite notes about it. Sherlock's hair starts to grey. Gregson retires. They observe all of these things from the brownstone as the years continue to turn.
The day after Sherlock's sixtieth birthday, he sits down with Joan and starts talking quite seriously, about retirement. As the years have gone on he's mentioned it several times, talking about a cottage and beekeeping in his "dotage," but she is honestly surprised. She expected that Sherlock would keep working until he couldn't do it any longer, probably because he'd stopped breathing.
Joan's knees aren't what they were, her parents are aging, and Oren's kids are ten and twelve. She wouldn't mind having a little more time for herself. She realizes midway through his explanation of the beehives he'd like to build that he's asking honestly for her opinion. He's not telling her what he intends to do. They're making this decision together.
She tells him that the new place definitely shouldn't have any stairs, and he adds it to the list of requirements with a flourish.
*
They close up shop for good (at least officially) five years later. The new police chief throws them a retirement party. Joan pens a goodbye message to Salon, which has faithfully published all of the stories she's sent them over the years. They've bought a little house at a good distance from the city, but not too far to visit. Since the place is in both their names, Joan gets a lot of junk mail addressed to Mrs. Holmes, which she enjoys throwing away.
Sherlock starts playing violin again, and writing his own book. Books, actually; the beekeeping one is nearly done, but he thinks it might be beneficial to write an investigative techniques book, since Joan steadfastly refuses to. She knows that the most interesting part of any case is the people who are involved. But she isn't going to stop him if it makes him happy. She has her own hobbies to pursue. She volunteers at the local Red Cross and takes a yoga class. She keeps writing -- not Sherlock Holmes stories, but kids books and a YA novel she can't quite seem to finish.
She watches Sherlock's hairline recede and emails her niece advice on boys. Sometimes she misses the work; occasionally someone from the department will make the drive for a consultation. Sherlock has been trying to teach Officer Hopkins his deductive methods, with some small success.
As always, every day with Sherlock Holmes is a grand adventure.
Fandom: Elementary
Length: 4370 words
Prompt: Yuletide 2013: The years go by and they stay together, for treble.
Pairing: Joan & Sherlock gen
Other: Minor spoilers for 2x24 The Grand Experiment. There is some implied violence and death, but nothing very detailed.
Excerpt: Sherlock and Joan through the years. Several years pass (regularly interrupted by the four weeks of vacation time Sherlock added to her compensation package). Sherlock doesn't pick the lock to her apartment anymore, not since she called the police last time and Gregson sent someone out to talk to him. The tide goes out, the tide comes back.
After Joan moves out, Sherlock sulks for two days. Then he calls Joan at one a.m. on a Tuesday, babbling on about the color of the suspect's hair and the particular dye she used.
Joan won't admit it, but she kind of missed this. She grumbles to Sherlock for waking her up as she pulls clothes out of her closet, getting dressed with the phone pressed between her shoulder and ear. She slips on her shoes and is running out the door before she realizes how brightly she's smiling.
They solve the case. Two days later, Joan unlocks the door to her apartment and barely bothers to kick off her shoes before she heads to her cool, dark bedroom.
She turns her phone off, which means that Sherlock kicks in the door six hours later in a panic. The frame is irreparably splintered.
"You owe me the cost of my security deposit," she says sourly. Sherlock apologizes, but Joan knows he doesn't mean it; it's the polite kind of apology, rather than an understanding kind. He still thinks he was in the right. As he tells her, completely earnestly, she could have been kidnapped or murdered.
"We're going to talk about this more later," she promises. Sherlock falls asleep on her couch, curled up in a bony little bundle like a child.
*
Joan has made a life out of enforcing boundaries. Sherlock has made a life out of breaking them. It's no wonder that they always come back to arguing about this.
Sherlock pushes and Joan pushes back. When Joan is in a good mood she thinks of it like waves breaking on a beach, continual and soothing. When she isn't, it reminds her more of a game of tug-of-war that she will never win.
She and Mycroft break up after about six months. It's mostly not Sherlock's fault, but he never really does become comfortable with their relationship, and if Joan is honest with herself, she feels a bit of resentment.
There's always the work, and Joan loves the work. But New York is starting to feel small. She needs a vacation. For the first time since she met Sherlock, she feels like she can take one. She ignores his melodrama when she tells him. Ms. Hudson agrees to look in on him an extra time that week, and so do Alfredo and Marcus.
Sherlock doesn't try to prevent her from leaving. He doesn't attempt to get around the apparently-laughable TSA security to go with her, and he doesn't get his friends in Everyone to put her on the no-fly list. She doesn't realize how tense she is until the plane takes off and she sinks back into her seat, sighing so loudly that her seat neighbor looks at her.
She loves Italy -- gelato and cobblestones, and the way the sunset slides across the hills. Sherlock sends her a postcard every day from home, some of his words lost behind the row of international stamps. In any case, he had to have sent them at least a week early so they'd arrive on time, and there isn't much to them. He sends her quotations from Greek philosophers and once, a sketch of Clyde that's quite good. She takes the postcards home with her when she goes.
Sherlock is waiting at the gate. There's been three murders in Queens over the past two days. She wrenches her arm carrying her luggage around until Marcus offers to keep it for her at the station.
It is wonderful and exhilarating and Sherlock gets a scar that bisects the 26.2 on his shoulder. Sherlock tells her a story about the marathon he ran through London in order to catch a serial rapist while she stitches him up.
"I got your postcards," she tells him, her fingers in his skin.
He smiles at her. Joan never quite manages to sign up for the exam.
*
Several years pass (regularly interrupted by the four weeks of vacation time Sherlock added to her compensation package). Sherlock doesn't pick the lock to her apartment anymore, not since she called the police last time and Gregson sent someone out to talk to him. The tide goes out, the tide comes back.
This morning he's waiting for her. When she opens the door, her nose wrinkles with the smell and she nearly shuts it again. Homeless man sleeping on her front step, or maybe an assassin pretending to be one. Neither of them have felt very safe since Moriarty escaped prison. But the source of the smell bounds nimbly to his feet and Joan recognizes her partner's sharp eyes. Some of his more elaborate costumes still fool her, but this is not one of them.
"What did you do, roll in garbage?" she asks.
"Verisimilitude," Sherlock tells her, primly.
She's not going to let him into her apartment smelling like that, but he seems content to follow her down the street, muttering nonsense under his breath and occasionally offering a real piece of information. They have a new case, probably related to the recent escape; he's pretty sure someone is trying to kill him; she would do well to brush up on her disguises. In fact, Joan isn't entirely sure why he's bothering with muttering. No one in New York would listen to or believe what he was saying even without the costume... No one but her, anyway. There's a knot of tension between her shoulders now, where a sniper's bullet could be any second.
Of course, that wouldn't be much like the woman who signs her letters "Jamie" in a careful calligraphic script. Joan has been getting them every Wednesday for the past year. They haven't stopped since the escape, although the postmarks have gotten more interesting.
Joan had been planning to go to the grocery store, but she sees take-out Indian food in her future. She's never been much for cooking, anyway. She has an overnight bag in her trunk and a gun she hasn't told him about locked in her glovebox.
Marcus has taken her to the range a few times, even gotten her the police discount on a membership. She's getting pretty good at shooting paper targets. He tells her every time that it's not at all like shooting a person, and she understands that. She's seen the other side of a shooting more than once, peeled bullets back out of broken flesh and coaxed it toward healing. She doesn't know if she could fire at someone, but she is a big fan of having options.
Sherlock breathes in her ear and she ducks down toward the sidewalk without hesitation, sliding her leg out to trip the man behind them with the hypodermic. He falls heavily onto the needle and she's up and running, Sherlock's hand tight on her arm.
*
They don't stop running until they hit Las Vegas. In a gambling city, Sherlock comes out the loser, or at least that's what she has to assume from the hotel room splattered with blood. It probably isn't enough blood to kill him outright, but when a week goes by and he doesn't turn up in any hospitals within a hundred miles, there isn't much else she can assume. Still, she waits two months, although she moves to a different hotel. They don't find Moriarty's body either.
Mycroft comes to New York and takes her back to London for the funeral. The Holmes lawyer tells her that she has been the primary heir to Sherlock's will for years, ever since she agreed to be his apprentice. He never bothered to tell her. Years later, she'll find the paperwork tucked into the coal scuttle, which was hidden in an upstairs closet. He'd bought the brownstone a couple of years ago. Now it's hers.
Sherlock has a formal funeral he would have hated. Mr. Holmes attends, but doesn't say one word to Joan. He does nod to her as she stands by the empty casket. And he doesn't fight the will. Mycroft tells her that means that his father liked her. Joan suspects it's something more about obligations and imagined debts and not having to worry about his troubled son any longer.
When she goes back to New York they have the real funeral, with Marcus, Gregson, Ms. Hudson, Alfredo and all the other friends and acquaintances they have acquired over their partnership.
This is not what Joan pictured when she thought about moving back into the brownstone. Her room is just how she left it - clean and empty, the extra sheets folded neatly at the bottom of the bed.
She wakes in the night at every shift and creak. The apartment settles.
She never gets another letter from Moriarty.
*
Joan has had a lot of careers, but she hasn't done much writing since freshman composition class. When Ms. Hudson suggests that she write a book, she laughs. She has enough to do between the cases she takes for the department and the ones she takes from the website she maintains now. She finds cats and killers, rescues women and heals old wounds. Sometimes she just listens, and that's enough. The work isn't her life, which is how she wants it. She goes on dates; she goes to the theater. She eats dinner on Thursday nights with her family. Her friends have adjusted to calling her a detective instead of a surgeon. When would she have time for writing?
Still, the idea sticks in her head. Mycroft is in New York for a while doing something he steadfastly refuses to tell her about, but he takes her to dinner one evening and she finds herself telling him the story of her last case with Sherlock, the story she hadn't been ready to tell back then. He's fascinated by the details she can remember. She can't believe it's been a year already.
When she goes home that evening, she starts to write it down, and after that, she tries to carve out a little bit of time in the evenings to work on it. Once she finishes the story of the Reichenbach Hotel, she starts another one. When she has about ten, a friend convinces her to send them to Salon's Life section, although she keeps the one about the hotel. They commission ten more.
Her therapist asks her if she's doing this to help keep Sherlock alive somehow. The therapist has a theory that deaths that don't leave a body are harder on everyone around the deceased, and that actively moving forward is very important. Joan thinks about it, running through the park each morning, enjoying the white curdle of her breath in the air.
There are a dozen different answers she can think of. To hone her observational skills - that would amuse Sherlock. Because people should know what they did, what she still does. Because she wants to make sure she remembers him properly. Because she realizes that she actually really likes writing.
She misses her next therapy appointment because she's solving a cryptic message someone left on a client's doorstep, and the therapist doesn't bring it up again.
*
Three years after Sherlock's death, a woman shows up on the doorstep of the brownstone with a thin volume tucked under her arm. She dances on the step like she has to go to the bathroom, tall and willowy, in a dark brown peacoat and black boots.
Joan has an office and a work phone number now, but occasionally people still show up on her doorstep. Generally those are the most interesting cases. They come to her when they don't have anyone else to turn to, brought by word of mouth from someone she likely still corresponds with.
The doorbell rings again while Joan is studying the visitor.
"Ms. Watson? Please, I just want a moment of your time!" the stranger says into the door. She has a breathy voice, a bit hoarse. She leans up on her tiptoes and then back down. She holds the book up to her chest and that's when Joan recognizes it - the book is the first collected volume of Sherlock Holmes stories.
Only a very determined fan would have been able to find her residence. Joan knows she should call Bell or Gregson to make sure that this isn't the wrong kind of determined fan, but she hesitates. She's learned to trust her instincts, and there's something screaming in the back of her mind to pay attention and let the girl in.
She unlocks the door. The woman dances in, curls in her face. She's talking a mile a minute.
"Oh goodness, it really is you! When Sadie told me she had your address, I was like, no way! But you look just like you do on the back of the book! A little older, but that's okay."
Joan mentally revises the woman's age down, but she smiles. "Can I sign that for you?" she says, reaching for the book.
"Please!" the woman says, handing it over with a jangle of bracelets. Joan pats her pockets but can't find a pen. She thinks that there's definitely one in the take-out menu drawer so she turns away for a moment. The young woman is glancing around openly, as if trying to find something magical in Joan's apartment. There's plenty to look at, Angus still at a point of pride on the mantel next to photos of her family. The case board is currently half-empty; she's taking the weekend off after solving a difficult kidnapping, but she leaves up older news articles sometimes in case something catches her eye. It's neater now than when it was Sherlock's apartment, but much of his stuff is still here. She's been cleaning out the upstairs first, trying to figure out what Mycroft might want and where to donate or dispose of the many unlabeled chemical compounds and out-of-date books, among other things even more difficult things to place.
When she turns back to the woman, the wig is gone and Joan Watson hits Sherlock Holmes very hard in the face. He goes down almost before she realizes what she's done, but she can't find herself regretting the impulse too much. There is a scar on her breastbone now that she got a year ago when she hesitated. She carries the gun now when she thinks she might need it, and her folding stick when she isn't sure. She's lucky she got to have her one major mistake without it being her last.
"Could have been a knife," she says, and he groans.
*
Later, they sit across from each other at the battered dining room table. Sherlock didn't complain when she ordered in Thai food, and he's wolfing it down now like he forgot to eat this week. He took off the peacoat to reveal a dress that fit him pretty well, considering what he had to work with. She has given away most of his old clothes but managed to find one remaining box in his old bedroom. He's wearing the green t-shirt he was wearing the day they met, and no shoes on his bony feet. She thinks he's lost weight somehow. His face is thin and there are dark circles under his eyes.
She's still mad. She's never been so furious at him, not since the first night he didn't return to the Reichenbach Hotel. Her rage is mixed with relief and frustration and fear. They've been talking for hours, Sherlock's glee slowly subsiding, Joan's urge to cry rising. Finally she suggested a break for dinner, thinking that raising her blood sugar might help. Sherlock is stroking Clyde's back with the hand not holding his chopsticks. He's gotten a new tattoo on his wrist, but she can't quite tell what it is.
"The dharmic wheel," he says, lifting his arm for her inspection. "I spent some time in Tibet lying low. The monks are very patient."
This isn't what Joan wants to talk about. "Mycroft knew the whole time?" she asks instead, continuing an earlier topic of conversation. She almost feels more betrayed by this fact.
One thing is for sure: the Holmes boys are more like their father than either wishes to admit.
Sherlock answers hesitantly. "It was necessary for someone to make the arrangements. My brother and I don't always get along, but I know I can trust him with my life."
"But not me," she says. He opens his mouth but she keeps going. "Don't say it. Whether or not it's what you meant, no matter how noble your intentions, you still can't treat me like an equal. Like the partner you promised we would be."
She puts down her chopsticks; she hasn't been eating much and it hasn't helped.
"I kept on with it after you left," she says, her throat thick with emotion. "All of these strangers trusted me with their problems and you can't even trust me to help take down someone we'd beaten before!"
She gets up and starts pacing. Sherlock stays still.
"She was going to kidnap your family. To start," he says. "Probably mine as well but yours didn't have bodyguards. She went on a date with Oren, she told me, although he was apparently quite dull compared to you."
His words ring into her sudden silence. Outside New York goes on, honking horns and screaming strangers and someone walking by whistling the theme to Cheers.
"You need to stay somewhere else tonight," Joan says, finally. She still can't forgive him, not yet.
"My br-- I have a place," Sherlock says. He gathers up his disguise and leaves her, the door clicking behind him. She suddenly wants to get up and run to the door, to verify that he's really walking down the street. That he's real.
Instead, she goes up to the roof and talks to the bees. Then she calls her mother, just to hear her voice.
*
Sherlock Holmes's return has far-reaching consequences that neither of them have anticipated. In his absence, she has made him famous -- well, Internet-famous, anyway. Now that he's back, lying low isn't an option. There are a dozen requests for interviews with both of them, and some rude man on Reddit writes a screed about Joan's inability to forgive, based on a few candid photos.
They don't have to consult each other before turning down these requests. They don't talk about them at all. They talk about other things, all the things Sherlock has missed. Joan tells him that Bell got married and Gregson is thinking of retiring, that Ms. Hudson is teaching Greek at a local university and Teddy got his GED. Sherlock listens, mostly. He still looks at her out of the corner of his eye like a man expecting rejection any moment.
He hasn't been reinstated with the department, although Mycroft was at least able to push through the paperwork to reverse his legal death. He finally ends up with a vacation visa to stay in the US, since he's no longer employed. It feels odd to Joan - she's living in his apartment, doing his job. Before it was carrying on a legacy. Now it's taking his place. Probably the worst part is that he's proud of that.
"Of course I knew you'd take over," Sherlock says to her one day. They have short visits at the brownstone; she jokes that it's like sharing custody of the building, sounding more flippant than she feels.
"It's like visitation," Alfredo responds, then. He talks to Sherlock almost as much as she does nowadays. Sponsorship is for life, he tells Joan.
"If you knew I'd step right into your dangerous life, why did you bother with the secrecy?" she snaps, and he is silent.
Eventually the conversation picks up on something else innocuous, but before he leaves that evening, Sherlock knots his scarf around his neck and says, "Because I had to try."
She lets him go.
*
His story comes out in short bits and asides, and it isn't until several years later that she has it all pieced together. The conflict in the hotel room didn't end well. Of course, he knew that Moriarty was waiting for him there. It was the only logical place for her to be. Joan was sent on a wild goose chase in pursuit of a suspect who was in all likelihood one of Moriarty's agents, and she wouldn't be back in Las Vegas for at least a couple days. If Moriarty wanted Joan out of the way, she was definitely coming for Sherlock.
He would be easier to take care of, Moriarty said. Then she told him her plans for Joan's family, to make Joan easier to deal with. Sherlock kept her talking as long as he could, but eventually he overstepped and Moriarty drew the gun. He fought for it and the resulting struggle resulted in four shots. Two hit Sherlock and one hit Irene. (Sometimes he slips up and still calls her by that name; Joan never corrects him.) The fourth bullet was recovered at the scene.
Of course, gunshots generally invited attention, even in seedy hotels, but one of Moriarty's lieutenants had smuggled them out; she wanted, she told him, to be sure that he was dead.
"It would probably have been easier to shoot me again, or have someone else do it, but her arm was ruined, and she wouldn't trust it to anyone else," he said. Joan had handed him her smartphone so he could make a call, but he hadn't resisted the opportunity to page through some of her unpublished story drafts, which included Reichenbach. Joan had filled in holes with speculation, but after correcting that statement, he didn't say anything else about it, not then. The rest comes in quiet moments after finished cases or hard, late nights.
Moriarty died before they made it to the safe house. She breathed her last in the front seat of the getaway car. Sherlock was so drunk on blood loss that he hadn't minded being left for dead in a dirty alley by her lieutenant. A local midwife had rescued him, patching him up in her own home when he begged her not to take him to a hospital, and although he had some pointed things to say about her homeopathy when he told the story to Joan later, Joan knew he occasionally helped pay the woman's rent.
Joan never ends up publishing that story, anyway.
*
Eventually it gets easier. They become accustomed to each other again. Sherlock apologizes. She refuses to refer to his missing years as the Great Hiatus. He brings home another turtle so Clyde won't be lonely, and by that point it is his home again too. The new turtle is named Bonnie, of course.
Over the past couple of years he's moved back in. It's hardly noticeable; he had nothing but the clothes on his back when he came back. He buys more clothes from local thrift shops and Joan's mother knits him mittens. He doesn't complain too much that she cleared out most of his most esoteric and dusty things. Others she hung up on the walls for decoration, so really the decluttering is a good thing.
She doesn't move out. The brownstone has become hers in a way it never would have if Sherlock had stayed. She hosts a book club Tuesday nights; she replaced the leaky bathroom faucet a few years back. He fits himself back into her space, and that chafes a lot less.
They solve cases, both together and separately. They argue about whose turn it is to clean the bathroom. Joan almost gets married once, but it doesn't work out in the end. Sherlock still brings people home and puts up polite notes about it. Sherlock's hair starts to grey. Gregson retires. They observe all of these things from the brownstone as the years continue to turn.
The day after Sherlock's sixtieth birthday, he sits down with Joan and starts talking quite seriously, about retirement. As the years have gone on he's mentioned it several times, talking about a cottage and beekeeping in his "dotage," but she is honestly surprised. She expected that Sherlock would keep working until he couldn't do it any longer, probably because he'd stopped breathing.
Joan's knees aren't what they were, her parents are aging, and Oren's kids are ten and twelve. She wouldn't mind having a little more time for herself. She realizes midway through his explanation of the beehives he'd like to build that he's asking honestly for her opinion. He's not telling her what he intends to do. They're making this decision together.
She tells him that the new place definitely shouldn't have any stairs, and he adds it to the list of requirements with a flourish.
*
They close up shop for good (at least officially) five years later. The new police chief throws them a retirement party. Joan pens a goodbye message to Salon, which has faithfully published all of the stories she's sent them over the years. They've bought a little house at a good distance from the city, but not too far to visit. Since the place is in both their names, Joan gets a lot of junk mail addressed to Mrs. Holmes, which she enjoys throwing away.
Sherlock starts playing violin again, and writing his own book. Books, actually; the beekeeping one is nearly done, but he thinks it might be beneficial to write an investigative techniques book, since Joan steadfastly refuses to. She knows that the most interesting part of any case is the people who are involved. But she isn't going to stop him if it makes him happy. She has her own hobbies to pursue. She volunteers at the local Red Cross and takes a yoga class. She keeps writing -- not Sherlock Holmes stories, but kids books and a YA novel she can't quite seem to finish.
She watches Sherlock's hairline recede and emails her niece advice on boys. Sometimes she misses the work; occasionally someone from the department will make the drive for a consultation. Sherlock has been trying to teach Officer Hopkins his deductive methods, with some small success.
As always, every day with Sherlock Holmes is a grand adventure.