Written for Writers Rock's February Frenzy on Live Journal to week one, Prompt #7: a picture of teapots. Warning: Spoilers for season 3. Sherlock (BBC) belongs to the BBC and to its writers including, but limited to, Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat.
Mrs Hudson loved her jugs. No, not those jugs, silly, although she did find it a little bit sad that they weren't as pretty as they'd been in her erotic cabaret days. How that footage ever found its way onto YouTube she'd never know. Never mind all that. It was her china jugs she was particularly fond of.
They were in all sorts of different colours and patterns. She'd never paid more than a couple of quid for them and – although some were quite old now – she didn't think they were worth much financially. They were just pretty. She just liked them. She liked buying them off market stalls and jumble sales and out of charity shops. She liked dusting them and washing them and selecting which one to put milk in for her tenants. (Of course she did know how ridiculous it was to be making pots of tea for her tenants; she wasn't their housekeeper.) Most of all she just liked to open up the cupboard over the sink and look at them.
Jugs just sat there and waited for you to pick them up. They didn't do silly things like growing moustaches or keeping body parts in the fridge or being dead for two years. Jugs were straightforward.
She wanted Mary to have something nice like that. Something to brighten her day. Something pretty. She'd bought them a nice dinner service as a wedding present. It hadn't been on the list, but she'd thought that a young couple starting out ought to have a nice dinner service for visitors. Not that either of the Watsons was particularly young. But the marriage was young. Oh, you know what I mean.
She was planning to get something for the baby when it was born, of course. She thought a mobile might be nice. Something colourful to hang over the cot. She'd seen a nice one with horses: all sorts of different colours of horses. No doubt Sherlock would say that it was ridiculous to give a baby the idea that horses came in green and pink and blue, but what did he know? Really. Well, lots of things of course, but when it came to the things that mattered he often turned out to have no idea. He'd probably want to make the poor mite look at skulls or eyeballs or something.
As well as the mobile for the baby, she thought it might be nice to give Mary something pretty for herself. There was a bric-a-brac stall near Camden market which sold all sorts of pretty things. All overpriced, of course. But it was a present. There were these green shelves, almost the height of the shop, all full of teapots. Every sort of pretty, painted teapot imaginable. Lovely, they were. Mrs Hudson had spent several afternoons gazing at them, trying to choose the nicest one, the one which would cheer Mary up when she was stuck inside with a crying baby because it was raining too hard to go to the park. Mrs Hudson had almost decided on a yellow one with a blue leaf design running round it, although she preferred the pink and gold one shaped like Aladdin's lamp herself. The blue leaves were more Mary somehow.
Or rather, they suited the Mary she thought she knew. She'd seemed such a gentle, sensible, kind girl. Almost boring. Dependable. Just right for John, what he needed after Sherlock. Not like Sherlock at all. But there you go, it just goes to show, doesn't it? You never can tell.
And what sort of teapot could you buy for a woman who shot people and had a secret violent past? It didn't seem appropriate somehow. Mrs Hudson could no longer picture the rainy day and the teething baby, and even if it did happen – well, of course it would happen but it wouldn't be the same, somehow – then she really wasn't sure that a teapot would do the trick in cheering Mary up. With or without a pattern of blue leaves. She'd probably prefer Sherlock's skulls and eyeballs.
So Mrs Hudson went down to the bric-a-brac shop and she looked at the green shelves of overpriced teapots. And then she jolly well bought herself the pink and gold Aladdin one. It would look lovely with her jugs. Mary – or whoever she was – would just have to cheer herself up.