A/N: Sherlock is not mine (sadly!) it belongs to the memory of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the geniuses of Moffat & Gatiss! This is just a little one-shot, and my first fanfiction of that length, based on the gripping season three final episode. Just going to say clearly now that this is not a mystery solving story, it's more of a character-based story, Sherlock-centric but with oodles of the Watsons. Hope you enjoy it and please, please, please do leave me reviews and if you would like to follow me on Twitter for comments on just about everything and fanfiction updates, my account is La_BellaBorgia.

Out of My Depth

Sherlock was stumped. He was rarely that, but on this occasion his mind had reached its far-off limits and had let him down. Ever since the day of his four minute exile that took place just above the fields of Essex in the private plane that took off from Stapleford Abbotts, which was two months ago, he had been hot on the case of the recurrent James Moriarty.

Mycroft had filled out the relevant paperwork and greased all the necessary palms that were needed to keep him in bonnie, old Blighty. His big brother had also managed to assure him that he would be paid a substantial amount – up to six figures he had been informed – if he could adequately explain how a dead criminal's face appeared onscreen everywhere throughout the land taunting the police force and indeed, the consulting detective himself.

"I said, what do you think, John." Sherlock stated in his usual irritated tone.

John Hamish Watson huffed in exasperation as he sat down next to his often obtuse and ever-brilliant flatmate and best friend, informing him that he had been downstairs showing Mrs Hudson the ultrasound scans of the baby for the past hour. The doctor was not surprised that the detective had been ignorant of his disappearance but it did perplex him that such an astute and competent man, who observed everything else in the world, no matter how insignificant or inane, could not notice when his only companion quit the room.

"Oh, I thought you had just gone into the kitchen…" Sherlock explained, "anyway, what do you think?"

"About what?"

He groaned, "About what? About Moriarty! It is a quandary, I must say. Even I can't manage to see how he's done it. He is – was – a genius, no question about it, but he is dead. I saw him and I also know I was able to dismantle his network. So, how is he still here…annoying me?"

John laughed, "You really don't know? My God, alert the media, call Scotland Yard, email the Prime Minister, William Sherlock Scott Holmes has no idea how his archenemy has returned from the dead!"

Sherlock turned to look at his friend with a glint of surprise and happiness in his eyes at John's sarcastic and melodramatic outburst, the most interesting thing in which was his use of his full name. Since their 'last' conversation on the airstrip, John had revelled in his newfound knowledge of Sherlock's full name, as he – in turn – had done when he read John's birth certificate. Doubtless, Holmes' name wasn't as ludicrous as John's but it still revealed much as to why the detective was …well, the way he was.

"Four nicotine patches and still nothing!" Sherlock exclaimed, bounding off his chair.

"Four? Four?!"

"It's a four patch problem!" Sherlock replied, smiling as he recalled the first time he and John bickered about his misuse of the quit smoking aids.

"Sherlock," John sighed with time-honoured concern for his dearest friend's wellbeing, "you're going to kill yourself. Please don't take that joy away from some bugger who's been waiting to kill you for making them look like a tit all their life."

"Ha, bloody ha," he said back to his friend while he put on his standard black trench coat and pulled the collar up to shield his neck from the chilly London air (and to appear cool and aloof, naturally!).

"Where are we going?"

"You're going to want to fetch your coat, John," Sherlock told him, seeing words appear like a halo around his friend as he deduced his time away, "you've just received a text from Mary. I suspect we'll need a taxi to Bart's."

"What?!" John burst out, rummaging around in his pockets for his mobile phone.

"It's in your left hand side jacket pocket, John."

He checked the suggested pocket and did, indeed, discover his mobile phone and swiftly flipped open the cover and read the message from his wife, which did – as his friend predicted – relate that Mary's contractions had begun and that she was in an ambulance en route to St. Bartholomew's Hospital.

"What…." John stammered out, looking utterly aghast and completely at sea, "what do I do? Sherlock, tell me, what the hell do I do?"

Sherlock Holmes was taken aback by his friend's loss of countenance and calm comportment in the light of the onset of his wife's childbirth. He had always relied on John Watson to be cool and composed in the face of disaster, or at least, in the face of a new challenge, but here, right in front of him, was a man who had allowed himself to be paralysed by his fear of the forthcoming event. It was an enigma to the detective as to why men who could easily maintain their sense of calm in the face of inhuman and unearthly evil and maiming could all of a sudden lose their wits at the prospect of something as natural and lacklustre as a woman giving birth. Women had quite literally being having babies since time began.

"Mrs Hudson! We're going out, to the hospital, will probably be late. Childbirth for a woman of Mary's size takes on average between fifteen to twenty-four hours. Don't wait up!" Sherlock bellowed as he ushered a still flummoxed Watson out of 221b Baker Street and outside to hail a taxi.

"Childbirth? Sherlock," Mrs Hudson inquired as she emerged from her bedsit to her two boys bolting from the flat, "Is it time? Ooh, how lovely. Good luck, John. How wonderful!"

"Indeed, Mrs Hudson," Sherlock snapped, irritated by his landlady's incessant babbling, "But we must be going now."

Mrs Hudson followed them to the door and murmured to Sherlock, "You're going too, are you? Are you quite sure you wish to?"

Sherlock glanced at the older woman with incredulity and disappointment all mixed into one grotesque mask, "Yes, of course I am going. I mean look at him, he can barely make it to the door by himself…how is he going to be of use to Mary without me to help? The man can barely exist without me."

He did not allow her another chance to get a word in edgewise before he pretty much shoved his blogger out the door and with distinctive authority called a taxi. He had already calculated that the journey to the hospital that was his home-from-home at this time of day would take twenty-one minutes precisely. This calculation had taken hours of taxi journeys from his flat to the hospital at various times of day and degrees of traffic.

He informed his catatonic friend, "John, we'll be there in twenty minutes, which – by my estimations – will put Mary just at two centimetres, so rest assured, you will not miss a thing."

The expectant father's response was unintelligible. The poor man was unable to even utter one comprehensible syllable. If the circumstances had been different, Sherlock would have been slightly inclined to diagnose him with a stroke, but he had been reliably informed (by his dear brother) that men whose wives were in the arduous process of childbirth were habitually overcome by abrupt changes of manner and even personality.

Another thing which the detective had to ready himself for was the unusual event of him actually shelling out cash for a taxi conveying both himself and his colleague. He had foreseen John's current state of inertia and relied upon the fact that he would be unable to remember if he had sufficient funds for the taxi ride to the hospital and/or would be unable to retrieve said money from his wallet and Sherlock did not feel at all at ease helping himself to John's cash, even on such an occasion as the impending birth of his firstborn.

Sherlock quickly pulled John behind him and into the reception area of Bart's maternity ward and asked for the whereabouts of Mary Watson. Once again, he and John were mistaken for a couple, which was not made more unlikely by the current handholding of the pair of men as they rushed away from the desk.

That was what knocked John Hamish Watson back into the real world, to which he reacted, "We are not a couple! I am not gay! It's my bloody wife who's having the baby!"

The next thing he was aware of was being roughly pushed through a door of a private delivery suite and being cussed at by his labouring wife who had been expecting both him and her daughter to arrive much quicker.

Seeing Mary in the agony of childbirth roused the physician in John and he instantly soothed his wife and inquired after her medical condition and treatment and that of the baby. Once he had been apprised of the entire situation, he understood that there were at least five more hours of labour to go before the baby would be making its appearance, so all there was to do for the father and his 'friend' was to wait.

"I want to stay with her."

"John," Mary moaned, "get the hell out of here and take Sherlock with you! You are never coming near me ever again."

"But-"

"No, you are going to walk out of this room right this second because if you don't, John, I am going to kill you with this small tray of blunt instruments."

At that threat, Sherlock whisked his friend away from his former assassin of a wife and told him that they were going to go and get her some ice chips (as he reasoned that that was what spectators at a birth were supposed to do). It was rather like pulling a recently shot buck back to a hunting lodge, but the sleuth did not enjoy seeing his best friend in more distress than he needed to experience.

"Well, that was unexpected…" John mumbled as best he could.

"Mm-hm." Sherlock succinctly concurred.

John pulled his friend over to the seats conveniently placed outside the delivery room and bent down so that his head was cradled in his clammy hands while his breathing returned to a regular rate.

Whilst Sherlock had done all the research he could think of to do so that he might be of use to the Watsons during the effort to get the third Watson here and had been – up to this point – a relatively positive presence, none of his research material specified what he ought to do once he was away from the labouring mother and with an unnervingly quiet father-to-be. He was now out of his depth and although he had told the prospective parents not to panic on their wedding night, it was now him, the nobody, the clingy best friend and ex-flatmate who was on the verge of outright panic.

He said as calmly as he could, "John, I am very sorry for what I am about to say as I did not want to in any way burden you on this day, the day of your daughter's birth, but I fear that I am about to experience something that is almost entirely unknown to me other than in situations where death is concerned."

"Sherlock," John interjected, uncomfortable with the direction their conversation was taking, "what is it? What's the matter?"

"John, I have to apologise for being insufficient in the current situation."

"Hang on, you, the Almighty Sherlock Holmes are apologising?!"

Sherlock rolled his eyes, "Yes, I am, and it's incredibly difficult so if you would kindly desist from constantly interrupting me so that I can finish speaking, I would be ever-grateful!"

"Sorry." John whispered, looking perfectly contrite for his sins against the 'Almighty'.

"As I was saying," the sleuth continued with his definitive air of superiority, "I do apologise, John, most sincerely for my lack of knowledge on the subject of your daughter's impending arrival. I had hoped to be of more help than hindrance but as you might have deduced, I am literally painfully out of my depth."

John Watson could list the number of times his friend had exhibited his softer and more tender side to him and others on a single hand (namely in his reaction to the CIA's treatment of their landlady, seeing him with explosives strapped to his chest and when the two were saying goodbye before Sherlock's brief 'exile') but this…this topped all of those instances. Sherlock had not only said he was sorry on this occasion, which was an even rarer event, but also was wearing an expression similar to that a child would show on smashing his mother's favourite perfume bottle or accidentally deleting all his father's work from his smartphone. It was poignantly endearing. Sherlock had said before that he and Mary were almost parents to him and when he said that it had been in jest, but now, John saw how he saw what he had confessed to them was true. He really did think that he was accountable to John for his mistakes and shortcomings. It made John wonder what his friend's formative years must have been like, with such a distinct need to come clean for misdeeds and to confess his crimes, whether or not they truly were crimes.

"Dr. Watson? Dr. Watson," a junior midwife called him, interrupting his reverie on the intricacies of Sherlock's personality, "Mrs Watson would like you to be with her now. Don't worry, she's quite calmed down now and the labour has progressed quite rapidly. It shouldn't be too long now."

"Go. Be with Mary. She needs you."

With Sherlock's concise dismissal, John left and bustled back into the room and hastened to his wife's side, leaving the high-functioning sociopath alone to rearrange his mind palace.

An unknown period of time later, Sherlock was brought out of his mental shuffling and collating by his best friend's rushed footsteps followed by the slam of the door. He immediately stood up, his Verdigris eyes flashing open and widening in expectation of the good news.

"She's here, all pink and healthy…and perfect! I can't believe it, she's so beautiful, Sherlock! The spitting image of Mary too!" John garbled out.

In a rare display of physical sentiment, Sherlock clapped the new father on the back and pulled him into a brief embrace as he did sense that the other man's heart was far too fast than was considered healthy.

"Many congratulations, my friend!"

Just then, his phone vibrated in his suit jacket pocket.

Pass on my congratulations to John and Mary, won't you, dear brother, and inform them that a small token is waiting for them in their nursery, which I am reliably told is 'simply delightful'. M.

"Mycroft sends his congratulations and I believe – from his words and a bizarre trip that I know he took to Hamley's – that in the nursery you will find a very ugly stuffed panda."

"Why would your brother buy my daughter an ugly stuffed toy?"

Sherlock sighed in disappointment at his friend's lack of deductive reasoning, "John, fatherhood has not ameliorated your deductive powers one jot, has it? I said (didn't I?) that Mycroft went to Hamley's. Well, any item chosen by my dear brother must indeed be ghastly."

John laughed freely and a thought popped into his jubilant mind in that moment of friendly camaraderie, "Wait a moment. I'll be back any minute."

While he waited for John's imminent return, he proceeded to text Lestrade and Molly with the news, adding to Lestrade's the request that someone (his exact words: 'your least stupid officer') telephone Mrs Hudson to relate the news. He so preferred text, but sadly, he could not persuade his landlady to acquire a mobile phone.

Just as he concluded his final text, John's head popped round the door, "Come on then, Sherlock! She's waiting to meet you."

Sherlock had not actually imagined he would see the infant until it had been adequately cleaned and dressed and was presentable, but he could easily see the excitement on John's face at the notion of his friend clapping eyes on the newest addition to their little and adorable family, so he swept his inhibitions aside and strode into the room, confident that babies – like dogs – could always sense fear.

Mary looked well for a woman who had just pushed an 8lb 6oz baby out of her body, to be sure, she appeared fatigued and sore, but that was to be expected.

"Sherlock," Mary said with a radiant smile spreading from cheek to cheek, "we would like to introduce you to Helena Stephanie Sara Watson."

"Four names?" Sherlock asked, perplexed as to why the Watsons, who both came from working class families, would bestow four names on their child.

John had a glint in his eye when he asked teasingly, "Have you truly not realised?"

Sherlock was genuinely befuddled, "Realised? Realised what, John?"

"Oh, William Sherlock Scott Holmes, your initials are WSSH. Well, we decided to mirror you in our daughter," he continued, despite noticing Sherlock's discovery, "whose initials are HSSW."

"Whose idea was this?"

John knew better than to expect words of gratitude, but as he laughed at his friend's response, Mary answered that John thought of it just after he had found out the detective's full name. They both just wanted to keep it a secret until Helena was born safe and sound.

"I truly am honoured. Though, I am rather surprised you didn't call her Shirley."

"Three first names was enough, Sherlock, no one in this day and age would call a child Shirley…I would rename you first!"

"Never! I am always going to be the one and only Sherlock Holmes!"