Over on tumblr in the last few days a new ship has come to dock. It's a ship that's been sailing, under the radar, of people's minds for a while, but it got a name this week and the FEELS. So, though PetraTodd has introduced it here with her "Red Triangle" fic, is one of my own Jollock pieces. John/Molly/Sherlock is such a lengthy shipname, which is where Jollock comes into it. Yes.

Expect to see probably five or six more of these!

Enjoy!

"Clarinet."

"Violin."

"Clarinet."

"Violin."

Anita Hooper watched as her Father and her Daddy argued in a bizarre manner composed mostly of those words—Violin, Clarinet—and eyebrow raises and shoulder squarings. She rocked back and forth on the balls of her feet, bumping Mummy's knees as she did so until Mummy's hand came down on her shoulder to quiet her. She didn't really care what Father and Daddy decided on, just that they did soon—she and Hamish needed their lunch! And then there was her older sister Cathy who needed to be picked up from judo, and Father had to go see Uncle Greg soon because he was getting a lot-a lot of text messages and that always meant Uncle Greg was coming for a visit.

"Sherlock, John…" Mummy knew that all these things needed to get done as well.

It would be many years before Anita would think to question the dynamics her parents had, or understand the looks that her teachers would give her and her siblings. That there was a reason that Cathy could look as eerie as Father, or why Hamish looked like Daddy. That there was a reason she learned piano and not clarinet or violin.

"Cambridge."

"Study abroad."

"Cambridge."

"Study Abroad."

Father wanted adventure, but Daddy wanted the best for her. She knew that as she tried to tune out her parents and their arguing—well, fussing more like. In the psychology class she'd taken they'd covered relationships, how threesomes rarely worked out in the long term—and she'd thought of her parents, and how they were the kind of people to force such a well-to-do textbook into using the world rarely. To say they never worked out would be to invalidate what Mummy had with Daddy and Father.

Because without Mummy, Daddy and Father would have self-destructed long ago in Anita's opinion. She didn't often share it—it horrified poor Cathy, and it was met with a condescending sniff from Hamish—but she knew that Mummy shared her views. Mummy was there to keep their bickering to a minimum.

She and Cathy shared the upstairs room that had once belonged to Daddy, while Mummy slept—usually—in what had been Papa's old room. Papa and Daddy slept downstairs in 221C, and Hamish slept in the second bedroom down there. But those are the assigned bedrooms—with a family as cobbled together as theirs, there was plenty of bed-switching.

Daddy said that it appealed to Father's inner, repressed bohemian. Mummy said it was just easier. Father would smile and sit in his chair with his violin at his neck.

Just about the only time her Daddy and her Father agreed on whose course of action to follow regarding Anita was on her wedding day. She barely kept the tears in check as each of them took one of her hands and placed it in the crook of his arm—they'd agreed, nearly instantly, which of them would walk her down the aisle. Both of them would, of course.

But that didn't mark the end of their squabbles, not by a long-shot.

"John."

"Sherlock."

"John."

"Sherlock."

They were vying for whose name ought to be given as a middle name to their first grandson while their son-in-law was off getting a coffee.

"Michael."

Anita turned her attention up to her mother for the first time—her focus had been on Grayson, who was by far the most beautiful precious thing she had ever seen. Mummy was smiling in that sweet way which resembled Father's awkward smiles. Daddy was, really truly, much better at smiling than Mummy or Father.

"Michael because without your Uncle Mike Stamford, your father would have never met me, and would never have met your dad. I know he's been gone for a while, but this could be like him coming back to us, right?"

Father's mouth worked in that worrying manner it did when he was about to spout something particularly atheistic. Cathy, Anita, and Hamish had been raised as proper thinkers—some of her earliest memories were of Father carefully explaining monographs by Carl Sagan or Richard Dawkins as bedtime stories—but there were limits. Surely on the day of little Grayson Michael's birth her Father could tolerate a bit of superstition?

"I like it," she said, cuddling her baby to her a little closer, knowing that she'd managed to effectively shut them up.

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