The Adventure of the Serpentine Serpent
Summary: Sherlock and Molly go ice-skating. Fluff, set post-season 4.
Author's note: Please excuse this little excursion into the territory of shameless fangirling.
This story popped into my head when a lake near my home froze over for the first time in years this winter. Since it wasn't going away any time soon, I thought I might as well write it down.
Off the cuff and unbetaed, so all mistakes are my own.
I treasure all feedback immensely.
Hyde Park Corner, 3 p. m.?
He's never not short and to the point in his requests. But she knows she's privileged, because he at least puts question marks at the end of them when they're addressed to her. With John, he never does. But then again, John has got much better over the years at telling him to bugger off whenever he's being taken too much for granted, so it's probably fine.
The next message that arrives, barely fifteen seconds later, is no longer a question. But by then, she's already said "yes" in her mind anyway. Which he knew, no doubt.
Bring skates.
He's asked stranger things of her than this, but it is a surprise. Until she opens the curtains on yet another dark, early London winter morning, and knows why.
Overnight, the temperature has dropped so low that the frost has traced patterns on the window pane, a myriad of tiny, fragile flowers.
Molly Hooper smiles.
o o o
There used to be a picture in her grandmother's house - a cheap, rather faded reprint of an oil painting – that she loved. "Skating on the Serpentine" said the tiny legend at the bottom, and it showed a colourful, milling mass of people from a bygone time, men in top hats and frock coats, women in wide, long skirts and muffs, and children of all ages frolicking around on the glassy frozen surface of the lake in Hyde Park. It was a fairytale scene, one that she has never seen for real in all her years in London.
But it's real now. For the first time in more than a decade, the Serpentine has frozen over.
He's already there when she arrives, waiting for her in the bitter cold outside the entrance of the Hyde Park Corner tube station, dangling a pair of black skates from his gloved hands. Trust him to keep a pair of those at the bottom of his seemingly bottomless wardrobe. They do look used.
Did he know she loves skating, too? She hasn't done it in years, simply because there was no-one to go with. Besides, the ice rinks that spring up all around Central London in the pre-Christmas season are small and expensive and crowded. Lights too bright, music too loud, the smell of the overpriced chips and crepes from the food stalls too off-putting. There's never any room to breathe, the scramble within in the rink heralding broken bones and picked pockets. Not to mention that nasty incident back in December, when some perv followed a thirteen-year-old girl into the ladies at the Tower of London rink. The brave little thing screamed like a banshee, saving herself from the worst. He ran, and escaped undetected into the crowds. Greg Lestrade was still grumbling about it in January, with no more to go on than a short, grainy CCTV sequence.
They enter the park together, and it's just like in the painting. Except people are wearing modern water-proof jackets now, and colourful beanie hats, and few probably even know what a muff is anymore. But it doesn't matter – the chatter on the air, the holiday spirit even though it's just an ordinary working day in February, the sense of something extraordinary and unique going on, is exactly how she's always imagined it.
The café at the eastern end of the lake is open. They sit down side by side on the edge of the patio in front of it and put their skates on. She has to take off her woollen gloves to lace them up, and she fumbles a bit, her fingers numb with cold within seconds. He's ready long before her. When she straightens up, holding onto the wooden railing to keep her balance, he's already tracing small circles on the glossy surface. She picks him out easily, a tall figure made even taller by the skates gliding along in his dark coat, as easily and as gracefully as if he does nothing else all winter.
Really, the only thing that's missing is the top hat.
The idea makes her giggle. As if he's sensed it, he turns to rejoin her, holding out his leather-gloved hand to her as he advances. When she grasps it, he tows her right out onto the ice with him without stopping in his glide. She laughs in surprise, and for a moment her feet threaten to move much faster than the rest of her. She tightens her hold, and so does he, and after a moment, she's found her balance. This is like swimming, after all, or like cycling. You can't really unlearn it.
She used to regret that she never got to dance with him at John and Mary's wedding. But now she has this, she no longer does.
He skates with the same self-assurance as he walks, with long, firm strides, not afraid of filling the space that opens before him. It's a kind of practical, purposeful grace, rather than art for the sake of art itself. No flourishes, just an unshakable kind of confidence. It's as if she can feel it flow right through his arm and his hand into hers, and spreading from there through her own body.
Once they're free of the crowds by the shore, acres of glossy ice stretch before them. The low arches of the Serpentine Bridge look tiny in the distance.
"Race you?" he calls to her, a boyish grin on his face. He lets go of her hand, and they're off in a flash towards the bridge. She knows she doesn't stand a chance, with her much shorter legs, even unhampered by long coat-tails billowing in the slip-stream of their own making. But she's happy to just sail along in his wake for a bit, and watch him. It's still so new to see him like this - neither absorbed in yet another urgent task, nor languishing in the lull between. Just being.
Halfway to the bridge, she's fallen twenty yards or more behind. Glancing over his shoulder, he notices it, slows down and doubles back to her in a wide curve, with the same effortless ease as before. They're almost alone here, and she can hear the scraping of his blades on the ice, scattering tiny clouds of icy crystals on either side.
The surface of the ice out here is not white, like it is on the rinks, but darkly transparent, with dried leaves and rotting twigs frozen into it here and there. He startles her when he comes to a halt at her side, and she realises she's stopped in her tracks to gaze at the ice at her feet, as if trying to fathom just how deep it goes, and what's lurking beneath. She looks up at him. He's just pocketing his phone.
"How deep is it?" she asks.
"Deeper than you think," he replies and smiles at her, his cheeks red from the cold wind, the hair on his bare head blown into disarray.
She smiles back.
Side by side again, and at a slower pace now, they make it as far as the bridge. But even though they're moving again now, she's starting to shiver with the cold.
"How do you stop them falling off?" she asks him, meaning his ears, as she pulls her woollen bobble hat more closely over her own.
"I don't," he replies evenly. "Are they still there? Haven't felt them in a while." He shakes his head experimentally as if to get back in touch.
She giggles, and then she shivers again. He sees it, and tells her to put her hands into her pockets for the way back. She does, even though she's certainly not getting points for style this way. She wishes she did have a muff.
"I hope there's coffee," she says when the lakeside café comes into view again.
"Of course there'll be coffee," he reassures her. "I ordered it for half past three exactly."
They have to slow down on the approach to the café. Most of the other skaters are still milling around within shouting distance from it, and they have to weave their way carefully through the throng.
Several groups of parents, their hands around coffee cups to keep them warm, are gathered around the gas heaters on the patio while their children are having fun on the ice. Little children, wobbly on their legs like newborn foals, are getting towed hither and thither by patient older siblings. Some particularly vocal schoolboys are pretending to know what to do with the ice hockey sticks they're wielding. A gaggle of teenage girls who know surprisingly well what they're doing are practising pirouettes.
But there are other grown-ups on the ice, too, and they're not the only couple, either. There's a white-haired one that she finds particularly touching, the man so stooped with age that it's a marvel they can keep their balance, but they do.
A single man glides across her field of vision just then, stocky, middle-aged, with a very ruddy face, but surprisingly agile, placing his blades with great precision and obvious pleasure. She turns her head to watch him, it's such an incongruous sight.
"Used to be a pro," the explanation immediately presents itself in her ear, in a deep familiar voice. "Won the British Figure Skating Championship four times in a row in the early nineties. A knee injury put an end to that. Alcohol put an end to his second career as coach."
Just before the man disappears into the crowds again, seen from behind, he does seem to favour the left leg a little. And the ruddy complexion speaks for itself.
"Have you met him?" she asks anyway.
"No, I haven't," he replies, unsmiling. "Come on."
o o o
Their coffee is already waiting for them, a little cardboard tray with two covered cups balanced precariously on the wooden railing of the café patio. Waiting next to it is the man who no doubt provided it, none other than John Watson. He's busy juggling a cup of his own while retrieving one of Rosie's pink mittens from the ground when they arrive.
"Just keep them on, can't you?" he admonishes his daughter, probably not for the first time today, and goes down on one knee to wrestle her chubby little hand back into it. Rosie herself, muffled cosily in her buggy with only her bright eyes and her button of a nose peeking out from between layers and layers of fleece and wool, couldn't care less. When she spots her godparents, she starts wriggling excitedly, and the mitten is off again in seconds.
"'Lo, Watson," her godfather says to her, and she grins to show all her six teeth.
"Sasa!" the child calls out. "Moll!"
John seems slightly embarrassed, as usual. At almost a year old now, Rosie is perfectly able say "Daddy", and she definitely also says "Mummy" when they look at photos of Mary with her. But she insists on that slightly offensive moniker for Molly, and she can't seem to get the hang of "Sherlock" at all.
"Well, it's a lot of consonants," Mrs Hudson always hurries to absolve her. But Molly sometimes thinks they've got a little game going, those two, and Rosie's really just winding them all up. Maybe she'll start saying "Sherlock" when he stops calling her "Watson". Or the other way round.
"So, got a match, then?" the man currently resigned to being known as "Sasa" asks John, as soon as he straightens up again after replacing the mitten for the second time.
"Pretty sure, yeah," John replies. "Easy to pick out, really."
Molly glances down at Rosie's mittens and wonders why it should have been difficult to match them. They're obviously identical in colour, and they both have the same picture of a penguin embroidered on them.
"Can't be coincidence. Four attempts in twenty minutes," John continues. "Three rebuffed at once, but one semi-successful."
Molly is just about to suggest to have the mittens linked with a piece of string, like she used to have when she was a kid herself, if Rosie's so intent on getting rid of them. But by then, the conversation has already taken an unexpected turn.
"Semi, how?" Sherlock asks.
"Exchange of contact details," John elaborates. "Probably posing as -"
"Just like I said, then." Sherlock takes a sip of his coffee, looking content.
"Are you watching someone?" Molly asks.
"Who, me? No," Sherlock says, and smiles that smile of his that she never quite knows whether to trust, which in itself should be answer enough.
He turns back to John. "I think Rosie needs her nappy changed."
She's stopped marvelling at his extraordinary olfactory sense long ago, and simply assumes that it's true, even though Rosie's suckling happily on her mittened thumb right now, and not writhing around in discomfort the way she usually does when she needs a change. But John seems as ready to accept the verdict as she is, and starts steering the buggy towards the café. Molly moves to join them, but Sherlock thrusts their coffees at her instead and nods towards the closest gas heater.
"Don't bother, you just get warm for a bit," he says, and then adds with a grin, "If one of us comes along, it'll make John look loved, but two of us will just make him look incompetent."
o o o
Not ten minutes later, which she spends getting as warm as she can under the rays of the heater, Sherlock comes back out of the café alone, pushing the buggy. A friendly lady holds the door open for him. He hasn't bothered to take off his skates, which makes him tower rather absurdly above the small vehicle. Rosie has disappeared entirely into its depths. With the backrest tilted back, Molly can see no more of her than the top of her woollen hat. It's a little late in the day for her naptime, she thinks, but maybe the cold and the novelty of seeing people glide along as if by magic have made her tired.
"John's just met someone inside," Sherlock informs Molly cheerfully. "He says not to wait for him. Come on. She'll wake up if we don't keep moving."
Molly knows the truth of that well enough, and giving John a little breathing space by taking his daughter for a stroll is second nature to her by now. She offers to help manhandling the buggy over the edge of the patio onto the ice, but Sherlock picks it up easily with both hands, child and all, and sets it down gently on the slippery surface.
It's not the best idea they've ever had.
For the first few yards, they move along easily enough. Of course they do – the man at her side is Sherlock Holmes, after all, so how could anyone doubt his ability to safely convey a baby through a throng of people by any means of transportation, even on skates?
Molly's heart even does one of those unexpected little jumps when they cross the path of the elderly couple again, and get a huge double smile from them. She hasn't really thought about what they must look like to outsiders like this, she, him and the baby gliding along together. But it hits her now, and it makes her blush. If even random strangers are finding the image pleasant rather than absurd, then maybe she's allowed to actually dream of -
She's not paying the attention she should, and she realises it only when it's too late. She's not sure how it happens - either the buggy is seriously hampering Sherlock after all, or he was absorbed in the same pleasant reverie. At any rate, he gets his skates tangled up with the wheels, and before they know it, the buggy is out of control, and they career right into the little group of teenage girls who are still practising dance moves, and the people who have gathered around them to watch in admiration. The buggy collides heavily with a one of the spectators, who lets out a yell of surprise and pain, loses his balance, and goes down. Molly shouts a belated warning and makes a desperate grab for the vehicle, but she can't stop the buggy tilting sideways and then falling with a resounding crash. Sherlock, still clinging to the handles, goes down with it, and they all land in a heap on the hard ice, the stranger swearing loudly, Sherlock babbling apologies, and Molly frantically digging her hands under the canopy of the buggy to rescue the far too quiet child.
She comes out holding nothing but an empty woollen hat, and the equally empty padded onesie Rosie was wearing on the patio, the mittens still tucked into the cuffs.
She stares at the empty garments in shock, but only for a moment, because the next thing she hears is – unexpectedly, but oh so logically at the same time – the clicking of handcuffs, and then even louder protests from the man they've just bowled over, his ruddy face beet red with anger as he pulls at the restraints securing his hands in front of him. Sherlock gets to his feet, with exactly the same fluid ease as ever, and nonchalantly dusts the fine icy powder off his own gloved hands.
"Please excuse the disturbance, ladies and gentlemen," he announces to the onlookers who have gathered around the apparent accident in dismay. His voice is calm, but Molly can hear the secret glee in it. "Sacrifices have to be made sometimes for the sake of the restoring law and order, but I trust we've been sufficiently selective." He bends down and puts the buggy back on its wheels with one hand, revealing to the astonished spectators that it was indeed empty. "I can assure you no real babies were harmed in the making of this arrest."
A murmur rises from the crowd as it begins to sink in what they've just witnessed, and soon there's even relieved laughter. By the time the first onlookers have their phones out to record the event for posterity, two uniformed constables - in highly inelegant but practical heavy-duty regulation footwear - have arrived. They pull the former figure skating professional to his feet and start taking him back to the shore, silently resigned to his fate now.
Sherlock turns to Molly, who still stands there with Rosie's warm clothes in her hands.
"No more chatting up teenage girls now, pretending to be a talent scout," he says with both disgust and triumph in his voice. "And then following them into the loo for his own dirty purposes."
o o o
Their welcoming committee on the patio consists not only of John and Rosie this time, but also of Greg Lestrade. The Detective-Inspector is leaning on the railing with a huge grin on his face, while John next to him is struggling to keep the child on his arm wrapped in a borrowed policeman's high-vis uniform jacket for warmth.
"Bloody spectacular," Greg congratulates them as soon as they're within earshot. "If I hadn't known better, I'd have been really worried." He smiles at Molly in particular. "You were pretty convincing, too. Looked like you were in a right panic."
Molly doesn't reply. She's done it once, of course, put on a mask and lied to everyone for his sake. So it's natural that they all assume she's happy to do it again any time. The truth is that the price she's had to pay for it has come so high that she's made him promise never to ask it of her again. And she loves him all the more for respecting that, even if it means she's in for a little surprise now and again. Like this one.
Greg has already turned back to Sherlock. "Now I just hope he really is the right man."
"Oh, come on," Sherlock scoffs, navigating the empty buggy closer to the railing. "Professional figure skaters are a rare breed in the UK. Not that difficult to identify the one with the same type of limp as the man from the CCTV footage. Who else would pick an ice rink, of all places, as his hunting ground? He had to be someone good enough at it to have an excuse to get close to the girls. And he was obviously going to be here today, too."
He picks up the buggy to put it back on the patio. Greg receives it, and John critically flips the now slightly crooked canopy back and forth with his free hand.
"I said you could have it as camouflage. I didn't mention 'assault weapon'," he mutters under his breath, and pulls the borrowed jacket closer around Rosie. She has now taken to suckling on the edge of its hood, apparently fascinated by the unfamiliar colour and material.
"Oh, don't be a bore," Sherlock replies lightly. "Be proud. Your daughter's just solved her first case. And she wasn't even there."
"Well, that wasn't your idea," John protests, and they all laugh, until Molly remembers that she's still holding Rosie's much-needed warm clothes, and until Greg remembers that he has a suspected rapist to process, and it's a while before the subsequent flurry of activity is over. But then John and his daughter are on their way home, Greg and his men are on their way back to Scotland Yard, and Sherlock and Molly are left alone on the patio, still with their skates on.
"Not taking any more cases for the rest of the day, promise," he says after a moment with unexpected sincerity.
"Like you could ever resist," she chides him, and he grins a little guiltily.
"This one was a good pretext though, don't you think?" He holds his hand out to her again. "Come on. We'll freeze if we don't keep moving."
By the time they're heading out to the bridge again for their final round, the faint winter sun has already started setting behind it. But she barely feels the cold now, with so much to warm her from within.
THE END
February 2017