This is the first of a series of one-shot character studies. Updates will come with the inspiration, which if you're an author you know can be somewhat sporadic, so here goes...
Edge Piece
Friends were very nearly an impossibility for one Sherlock Holmes – he never really clicked with anyone else, not socially or even in a work-based relationship, where it basically amounted to 'tolerance.' Life, Sherlock had long since determined, was a puzzle, and Sherlock saw himself as the one working it, trying to make all the pieces match – perhaps with Mycroft muddling up the process by adding unnecessary fragments from other puzzles.
It was only with the introduction of John Watson that Sherlock reconsidered his theory. They clicked immediately, as if two pieces of the same puzzle, which puzzled Sherlock. No one so ordinary should be able to fit with him.
It took him long hours of consideration, but he came up with a new theory.
Mycroft was a complicated, zig-zag edged piece which drove the puzzle-doer crazy and belonged in the middle of the board, without which at least twenty of the pieces around them (Foreign countries, his mind supplied sarcastically) would fall apart. Anthea was one of those deceptively plain pieces that wouldn't fit anywhere for hours until you tried the most unlikely place. Mrs. Hudson's piece was all rounded knobs that latched onto the surrounding bits so tenaciously it took a well placed screwdriver to pry them apart. Lestrade's was sharp on one edge and rounded on the others, bouncing off where the point should have gone.
John was a genuine puzzle – with links and knobs and deceptively ordinary and solid.
It was this last that brought Sherlock to his conclusion.
Sherlock was an edge piece – sharp edges on the outside, but holding things together. John was the piece that tied him into the rest of the puzzle, his link, his bridge to the rest of humanity.
Sherlock nodded decisively to himself, sat up, and reached for his newest case file.
