The list of Martha Evangeline Hudson's personality traits is long, varied and surprising. Few people know, for example, that she knows how to make origami paper cranes, or that her mother used to encourage her to pickpocket. Well, Sherlock had to learn that particular skill from somewhere, and there was no better teacher than the woman who had once stolen a live chicken from a children's petting zoo, hidden in the hood of her coat.

She spent fifteen years married to a man she never speaks of, although she still thinks of him, sometimes. On some level, she still hates that version of herself, the version who used to let him hurt her over and over, but he's long since dead, and she long since forgave her younger self.

She knows that love does foolish things to us. She is patient, almost to a fault – occasionally she'll have a moment of self-awareness when she babysits the attention-defict genius Mallory, or when she has one of her great-nephews attached to her leg and another to her neck as she tries to tidy up, and she'll realise she's a bloody saint. She can't help it, even though she imagines it would annoy her if she ever met anyone as patient as she is. She loves, deeply and completely, and she'll do absolutely anything for someone she loves.

No matter how much of a weapons-grade wanker he happens to be.

Sherlock 'Bloody-hell-what-have-you-let-him-do-now' Holmes stood in her doorway looking confused, betrayed, angry and hungry. Mrs Hudson looked him up and down, lingering momentarily with feminine appreciation over the Grecian lines of him, and decided he was in a mood and she was not – I repeat, NOT – going to let herself be dragged into this again. Not today.

It was generally easy to tell if he was in one of his moods. He tended not to be wearing clothing, and he would be brandishing something unsavoury.

Today, he had fashioned one of her good tablecloths into a kilt of sorts, and he held before him a frozen tupperware of some unnamed red substance she was not going to look too closely at.

'Dear, I don't have time for this today. There's actually something rather important happening this afternoon, and I have to-'

Sherlock bristled visibly that she wasn't going to react to his appearance. 'You bought new shoes. Sensible, smart. You're trying to wear them in. You're cooking biscuits – ginger, so you're feeling nervous. Queasy?' His brow furrowed and he dumped the tupperware on her nice, clean table, suddenly concerned. 'Are you alright, Mrs Hudson?'

'Never you mind.' She stirred the butter melting over the hob and swallowed the hard lump in her throat. 'What have you gone and done now?'

'I have no idea what you mean.' He held himself to his full height, his strong neck fully extended like an insolent, childish swan, one hand rising to cover the mark on his collarbone as if reassuring himself it was still there.

'You're confused, which means you're still working through the conversation you had with Doctor Watson, trying to figure out what you did or said to cause the fight to happen. Fresh mark on your collarbone – really, I'd have thought a doctor would take better care of you than that – so you fought this morning. Maybe something to do with that disgusting thing you've left on my table?' She turned, and looked pointedly at the tablecloth. 'You were completely stark naked before you decided to come visit, weren't you? I have to say, Sherlock, I'm pleased you've started giving me the courtesy of covering your meat and veg when you pop round.'

He blinked at her, then settled into a chair, pulling the tupperware protectively towards himself. 'I think I'm a bad influence on you.'

'Dear, you're a bad influence on everyone. Except for the doctor.'

'You're always on his side.'

'Statistically, love, it's the right side to be on.'

He grumbled something under his breath, then released a deep sigh and let his shoulders slump forwards. 'I've never done anything like this.'

'This... do you mean having a boyfriend?'

He made a face. 'I hate that word. It's... childish. He's not my boyfriend. John and I do not spend any time sitting in trees.'

She sighed and removed the butter from the heat, beginning to fold it into the oat-and-flour mixture sitting on the counter. 'Mallory tried to explain that it's just a playground rhyme, Sherlock. It's not something expected of you. Although I have to say, I think John would make an excellent father.' She held the bowl against her chest and began counting out the number of times she mixed it, the way her grandmother had taught her. 'Fine. What is it you've never done?'

'We lived together before, and it was fine. It wasn't complicated – John yelled at me and I did my experiments and everything was easy. But now... I keep expecting I'll do something unforgivable. After Reichenbach... I never expected him to forgive me. I assumed he wouldn't, actually, and I was able to cope with that. What I can't stand is the fact that I'm going to hurt him, and I won't be able to blame it on Moriarty or Mycroft or anyone but me. I have no experience, no basis for comparison!'

'You don't need one. He loves you, the way you are. He's a bright man, Sherlock. He knows what he's getting into.'

'But why?'

'Why what, dear?' she asked, distracted again by the nervous energy in her belly. God, she wanted to go back to bed – as much as she adored Sherlock, she couldn't bear him today.

'Why does he love me?'

He said it with the voice of someone lost. There was no information in the mind palace for this, nothing to draw information from. A brief investigation into self-help books had produced more questions than results, and in the month since they had finally – god, that had been loud – consummated their relationship, there had been fights.

None, however, more than usual. Mostly along the lines of why is there never any milk or I don't care if it's an experiment I am not going to get into that bed until you change the sheets. Or, as it had been two nights previous and Mrs Hudson had been forced to put on her Alien Vs Predator DVD again, you are not allowed to distract me from being mad at you by taking your shirt off, Sherlock!

'It makes no sense. I'm an addict, and everyone but him – and you – eventually gets tired of me. He looks at me with these big eyes and I don't know what to do; my mind completely stops.' He threw his hands into the air. 'That never happens! I don't know how to fix it, because my brain won't work! I can stand the yelling – he mostly does it to make himself feel better, he's never really angry. But this... I think I actually hurt him. He just went quiet, and he won't talk to me.'

She grimaced and dipped her hand into the bowl of biscuit-batter, rolling a little ball between her palms. 'What did you do, Sherlock?'

'It's this case, I think. Something went wrong last night, and I had it under control, but he yelled and then he bit my neck and then all this other stuff happened-' a flush rose up that beautiful neck, settling high on his cheekbones, '-and then I woke up this morning and he didn't say anything at all. He just ignored me.'

'Is that why you're in the nip?'

'Nip?' he echoed, then his pale eyes cleared as understanding dawned. 'Oh, you mean I'm naked. Yes, previous experience does inform me that it's a relatively sure-fire way of making him like me again after he's had one of these irrational moods.'

'It's only irrational to you, Sherlock, dear. To him, it's perfectly rational. He knows his own heart. I was hoping he would help you to learn yours.' She slid the baking tray into the oven and smoothed her hair away from her temples with her wrists, careful not to get dough on her temples. 'What happened last night?'

'I died, a little bit.'

Mrs Hudson dropped a wooden spoon and released a torrent of Cockney curses that made one elegant eyebrow on her tennant's forehead rise. 'You did what?'

'Well, the murderer had dropped this woman into the Thames weighed down by a massive block of ice. She was a fifteen year old girl, whereas I am a physically fit adult male with experience swimming, so of course I followed her in, but my trousers got caught on a piece of metal , and my body temperature plummetted, so I started to lose conciousness and sink...'

'My god, Sherlock!'

'No, it's fine, because John had handcuffed the murderer to the bridge and he ran down and dragged me out. I was only technically dead for a few seconds, and the girl is perfectly fine.'

Mrs Hudson's mind whirrled. 'You risked your life for a girl whose name you don't even know?'

'She told me, I deleted it. Irrelevant, she was extremely tedious – kept crying and shivering.'

'You can try to act callous, but you risked you life for a stranger. Why? You would never have done that... well, you would never have done that.'

He looked ashamed and became suddenly extemely interested in his tupperware full of what she was beginning to suspect were toes.

'She looked like Mallory, only a little older and a lot more hysterical. I knew from the missing person's report... I'd seen her photograph. John pointed out that she looked a little like her, and I kept imagining that it was Mallory. Of course, the only thing the two of them have at all in common is a confusing liking of pink and a Nigerian Hausa-tribe ancestry.'

Despite how he tried to excuse it away, Mrs Hudson knew better. 'That's why he loves you, Sherlock. Because whatever you tell us – whatever you tell yourself – you are a good man.'

'He's angry with me. Why?'

'He almost lost you last night, dear. I think maybe you should actually try talking to him.'

The colour deepened in Sherlock's pale skin and again he looked away. 'No. If we talk, I'll say something wrong and then he'll leave.'

'You're being a child.' Mrs Hudson, normally so patient she once let her niece draw on her face with marker pen, finally snapped. He hadn't asked her why she was nervous, or maybe he had deduced and just didn't care, but it was not the right day to be pissing her off, and she would not put up with it. 'I'm on his side, Sherlock Holmes. John is the absolute best thing that's ever happened to you – you've done him wrong more often than not. You let him believe you were dead for a year, and I know better than anyone what that did to him.'

The vacant expression, the spotless, cold flat. The lack of any noise except the doctor's slow, slippered pacing, the limp audible even through the floorboards. How much weight he'd lost, how his cheery face had been drawn, and gaunt.

She loved Sherlock more than almost anything, but although John had forgiven him, she'd yet to properly forgive him.

'You have to try to be worthy of him. Have you even told him you love him?'

Sherlock's eyes were so pale, so distant. 'He must know. It's obvious.'

'He needs to be told. He needs to hear it, love.' She slammed a cupboard door shut too hard. 'I know you're not good at this. You've had no practice, and my heart goes out to you, it really does. But he deserves better than a man who'll risk his life and not tell him where he's gone. Don't you understand that he can't lose you again? He so nearly didn't survive the last time.'

He flinched, and she immediately felt guilty. He'd had his reasons, but reason had no place in love, and John had lost the man he'd never admitted to loving. Now that he'd told Sherlock how he felt, and the two of them had settled into something close to a normal relationship – nothing between them could ever be truly normal, the toes in the vegetable crisper saw to that – some of that had started to heal, but Sherlock was never one to change his ways. The consultant detective didn't know how to go about being loved the way that John loved him: with gentleness, without expectation or judgement. Mrs Hudson watched the way John's blue eyes softened and crinkled at the edges when looking at Sherlock, and love like that... it was kind, and precious.

Goddamn it, it was worth something. She would give anything to be looked at like that again, and if Sherlock Bloody Holmes didn't find a way to bend instead of breaking, she'd...

well, she'd stop baking for him. Although she wouldn't, because then he'd get too thin and she'd feel guilty.

She'd turn off his hot water.

Although seething on the inside, all she said to the mostly-naked man sitting with a box full of cadaver parts in her kitchen was this:

'sort it out, dear. And for the love of all that is holy, accept that it's definitely your fault, whatever it is. Now get out of my kitchen – I've got work to be doing.'

He smiled, that ridiculous face-mooshing smile which made everything alright and almost settled her nerves, and pressed a hand to her shoulder before disappearing.

Leaving the box of severed digits. She stared at it, and then swore.

'I hate to agree with anything Sally Donovan says, but if it were up to me all I'd need would be a smile and that boy would get away with murder,' she muttered, folding up her apron.

She had a trial to go to.