AN /: Just a quick not to get us started, this chapter skims the events of the first season of Sherlock, and contains spoilers for all three episodes. Other than that it's pretty tame but rating may go up later. For now though, enjoy :)
Disclaimer: 'Sherlock' and all characters within belong to the BBC, Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss. I'm just taking them for a joyride, I make no profit from this.
Tremble
For the most part, she hasn't paid any attention to the various tenants who have moved in and out of 221 Baker Street over the years. A lot of the tenants were so preciously boring that she hasn't felt like gracing them with her presence, and so she stays holed up in 221a at the top of the stairs, keeping the door locked and only venturing out when she needs to buy vital supplies like milk or water paints. Eventually she just stopped caring about her neighbours, letting them go about their business and keeping out of their way. Both the previous landlord and the current landlady had managed to leave her alone, which is nice. 221a was still her apartment, regardless of whether she paid rent or not, and not once has she been threatened with an eviction.
It just so happened, of course, that one potential tenant catches her interest. She has known for quite some time that someone would eventually rouse her from her state of indifference, but this new tenant is quite unlike anything she had expected.
Although her front door is quite sturdy it is not at all soundproof, and the first time she catches news of this new potential tenant is when the man himself is standing outside the door, talking to Mrs Hudson. Mrs Hudson is telling him that 221a was not available to rent, and hadn't been since she had bought the building from the previous landlord some twenty years ago. There was a thin excuse about not being able to find the key, and then she pushes the conversation to other topics, bless her. The man seems disappointed and instead begins to question about 221b, but as she continues to listen, her ear pressed flat against the splintering wood, it becomes apparent that he likes the flat downstairs enough to rent anyway and the matter of 221a was dropped completely. He mentions something about another flatmate to share with him, but this matters little to her. As far as she is concerned at the moment, he is just the same as the others, mundane and not worth her time.
When she first hears the dreadful wail of an abused violin from the flat downstairs, she actually considers scaring the other man away. It is one thing to be mundane, but it is another altogether to be a highly irritating mundane.
From what she has heard, listening to Mrs Hudson as she mutters to herself in the hallway, the new tenant has yet to find his flatmate but has moved right in. And so she decides to wait, to see what the other flatmate brings to the situation with the man downstairs, and to hope that there will be no more violin at three in the morning.
Every now and then for the next three days she hears the new tenant downstairs shout things. They sound like demands, but as they never concern her she never listens. It is the one about ice that catches her interest finally though.
"Mrs Hudson,' comes the silky baritone voice as it drifted up through the floorboards,' do you have any ice?"
"I have a whole tray full of ice cubes-" Mrs Hudson starts, and she hears her walk up from the apartment downstairs, but the new tenant cuts her off with a curious remark.
"Not what I need,' he says lightly,' I need enough to fill up a bathtub."
That was where she had really started to listen. There was something to that voice, to the way he explains very carefully why the ice cubes were needed to fill the bathtub because the fridge isn't long enough to hold a human arm, and she is compelled to listen to it. The man is smart, she guessed that much by how grammatically correct his sentences are, and he seems to be some kind of scientist judging by all this talk of experiments.
Maybe he's worth my interest after all, she thinks as she moves from her place at the door to her favourite spot behind her easel and picks up a brush.
Somehow, it isn't until the fourth day after his initial arrival that she learns his name. She must have missed it in the general conversation of flat ownership, and she is quite peeved about that.
It is about twenty past two in the morning when she opens her apartment door and quietly traverses the rickety staircase, moonbeams falling at her feet from the thinly curtained windows. The door to 221b is open and she walks forwards, cautiously sticking her head in through the doorframe. She isn't worried about being seen, she never is, so she walks forwards and leans comfortably against the doorframe and observes the man sprawled over the couch in front of her.
He is so incredibly thin, all lines and angles, and the blue dressing gown that he wears hangs off his lanky frame like it is several sizes too big. One arm rests over his chest, his tapered fingers splayed over his collar bone, and the other is hanging off the couch. His legs just reach the other end of the couch, and one of the lanky limbs is in the process of sliding to the floor. He looks quite angelic like this, but what is really quite stunning about him is his skin.
As an artist she sees the world in a peculiar fashion. Everything she lays eyes on is for a single instant warped into a painting in her mind before shifting back to normal, and as her vision of the scene in front of her shifts in her mind she sees the contrast in him, in his body and his being. His black hair, so black that it almost seemed to have shades of blue streaked through it, and blue dressing gown were at odds with the absurd paleness of his skin, almost a porcelain white in the dim light. His body, all harsh planes and straight lines, was so beautifully different from the softness she saw in his unguarded, sleeping face, and the slight curve of smiling lips. The unmasked happiness of a dreamer.
There is something in him that is very incredibly attractive. It is hard to place, but she knows that this is a man who would have both women and other men falling at his feet. He has a strangely androgynous look, and cheekbones that any model would die for. She wonders if this man has a girlfriend, or even a boyfriend, but drops the idea immediately. There is nothing personal about this apartment, no photos, no cards, no random knick knacks given by family and friends. Everything has some sort of scientific intent, and it is conceivable that he is most likely married to his work.
When he shifts restlessly she moves from the doorframe, walking across the floorboards and carpet to look around inside the flat. It is covered in newspapers and scientific equipment, every spare space being used. She is tempted to go and look into the bathroom, just to see if he has accumulated enough ice for his severed arm.
On the table next to the sleeping man she sees a laptop, its screen still lit and a website displayed proudly. A title at the top of the webpage reads The Science of Deduction, and is followed by a description of the website owner's amazing abilities of deduction, which seems just a little pretentious. Beside the laptop are three letters, each of them addressed to one 'Sherlock Holmes'. Seeing as the same name is written on the website, she assumes that Sherlock Holmes is in charge of it, and that it is Sherlock Holmes who is asleep on the couch.
She puts the laptop down and heads towards the door after having discovered all she needs to know about him, her feet silent against the floorboards, and as she passes through the doorframe the man's eyes burst open and he jumps from the lounge. She turns to watch as he frantically looks about for his laptop, apparently failing to see it in front of his face, muttering something about ladders and gardens.
She begins to walk silently back to her flat as the man finds his laptop with a shout and begins to type furiously with one hand, texting on a sleek mobile phone with the other. It seems to her that her new flat mate has more on his mind than he knows what to do with, and with a brain that active, she can only feel sorry for poor Sherlock Holmes.
She doesn't exactly 'meet' Doctor John Watson, more overhears the conversation as he talks awkwardly downstairs with Sherlock. His voice is a world of difference to the silky baritone that she is just becoming used to, but sounds pleasant enough that she doesn't really mind. Where Sherlock has a voice that is so seductive that it could, and does, manage to make an incredibly grisly murder sound fantastic, the new man has a voice that encourages you to agree with everything he says. Where Sherlock sounds sexy, he sounds nice.
She only listens to their conversation for a little while before she hears Sherlock leave, and then return a minute later to spirit the new man away with him. She is a little depressed when he leaves, as she was having fun listen to him talk. He talks like he doesn't need to breathe, and sometimes she is sure that he actually doesn't.
She hears from the conversation downstairs that her new flatmate was a military man, and she has always been fascinated by military men. They always have hidden depths to them, secret fears and burdens, and just as many amazing stories. For the first time in a long while she considers actually leaving the apartment and going to meet this military man face to face, but when a police squad clambers its noisy way up the stairs she decides that it's best to save it for another time.
The conversations that follow when Sherlock and John find that the police are conducting a drugs bust downstairs tell her more about her new flatmates than she could ever tell by just looking at the contours of their faces.
What is most apparent though, is that Sherlock is a genius, a complete and utter genius. Socially inept he may seem to be, but she is hardly one to judge. As she listens to his amazing deductions float up through the floorboards she begins to wonder if she has finally, after all this time, found the person that she has been looking for.
Over the next few weeks she leaves the new tenants to their own devices. She has taken a liking to just lying on the floorboards with her ear pressed to the wood, listening to them talk. It is very amusing hearing their domestic arguments, probably because a lot of them involve where it is and is not appropriate to store both human and animal body parts. Hearing Sherlock try to reason with John is the best entertainment that she has had in years.
She takes a liking to John. She has yet to see him, but he seems like a rational, sensible man with the patience of a saint. He puts up with Sherlock's outbursts of genius, destructive and offensive tendencies, and all of his other idiosyncrasies as if it is nothing out of the ordinary. It doesn't seem like he appreciates a lot of said idiosyncrasies of course, but it is nice to hear him patiently asking why there are dried frogs in the cupboards every now and then. Anyone else, she surmised, would have moved out within the first week of living with the hellish madman, but it did seem like John was there to stay.
Of course, when she has grown a well-founded affection towards John Watson she is understandably miffed when members of a smuggling ring knocked him out cold and dragged his girlfriend away screaming. She wishes she could have helped him, wishes she had known in advance that the flat was about to be invaded, but it did feel satisfying to knock one of the assailants out with a frying pan when he broke into her flat, presumably looking for more hostages.
When Sherlock has left to go and rescue John and his girlfriend she drags the man out into the street and phones the police, and then retreats back to Sherlock's flat and watches through the window as the police arrest a small man tied to a pole, out cold with a large lump on his forehead. She is been particularly amused when one of the three police officers finds the neatly written note that she had taped to the man's forehead, watching his baffled face as he reads her clear account of the kidnapping and then proceeded to call Scotland Yard.
Later she pops back into 221b when Sherlock and John had spirited out on another investigation, removing some of the worms that Sherlock had put into John's favourite mug without telling him, washes the mug three times and then puts it neatly back, and also removing a jar of live spiders from John's sock drawer while she is at it. It is the least she can do.
The whole fiasco with Moriarty is one that she could have done without. The explosion from the flat opposite shocks her and the noise assaults her ears, and she isn't too happy that someone has broken into one of the flats downstairs without her noticing because she knows everything that goes on in this flat. But it is after Sherlock and John return home after their frightful night at the swimming pool that she feels the most attached to them, with more affection than she has felt for anyone for years. She lies on the floor and listens to them all day and night, catching snippets of the story, and with each piece to the puzzle she hears the more her heart goes out to them.
Sherlock doesn't say a word for two whole days afterward, and John just sleeps the entire thing off. She spends what feels like hours listening to them, hearing their half whispered thoughts about their impending death by Moriarty's hands, about how John had pushed Sherlock into a pool as the bomb had gone off, saving them both. And as she listens, she could have sworn that she could hear Sherlock's brain ticking as he sifts through links and leads that could eventually result in their safety.
There hasn't really been much that she could do about their problem. She hasn't a clue whom Moriarty is, aside from what she hears them say, and she doesn't know the first thing about detective work, so instead she tries to help in the little ways. She tunes Sherlock's violin whenever he is out, washes a few of John's sweaters for him, and even steals a few biscuits from Mrs Hudson's secret stash and leaves them neatly lined in the tin for John to discover whenever he arrives back home.
She listens as they heal, and she wishes them all the best.
She hasn't even realised that she has never laid eyes on John until she ventures out of her flat one night to check on the strange scratching noises that she has been hearing for the past few minutes.
When she walks into the apartment it takes her only a moment to notice that Sherlock is absent, and it takes her only a few more to find a shoebox full of cockroaches under the table. She wrinkles her nose in disgust as she leaves it there with a large post-it-note for John's convenience, and then jumps as she hears the loud snore echo through the kitchen.
Curious, she follows the sound to a bedroom lit only by the moonlight and streetlights outside seeping through the curtains and the clock on the bedside table flashing red numbers at her. And on the bed is the man that she knows so well, but has never laid eyes on before.
John Watson is lying on the bed, his baggy old shirt and pants visible where he has kicked back the sheets. There is sweat on his brow and the front of his shirt is damp. His mouth is curved into a frown, and she can tell from the way that he shifts restlessly that he is having a nightmare. For a moment, in her artist's mind's eye, a portrait of the weary soldier appears, all soft lines and curves. Not that he is curvy exactly, or even pudgy really, but when compared to Sherlock he is definitely more round.
She looks over him and begins to see the contrast that he is to Sherlock. Most noticeably he is a great deal shorter, and where Sherlock is pale and raven haired John is sandy blonde and is still tanned from Afghanistan. He has little to none of Sherlock's severe lanky build, and is quite stocky and well built. At least she won't worry about him breaking after a single punch. He has no contrast on his own to speak of; his features fit and complement each other in an endearing yet handsome way.
John mutters something and rolls over onto his side, and as she stands in the doorway she feels sorry for him. His nightmares really must not be fun.
As she walks away quietly she makes up her mind. One day she will meet these men face to face instead of when they are at their most vulnerable. One day she will meet them, talk to them even, and although she hasn't talked to anyone in years she thinks that she is still able to. Yes, one day, soon, she will meet them, and they will help her find her bones.
End- Part One