The Adventure of the Second (and Third, and Fourth) Stain
I do not own these two even a little bit. They were unceremoniously taken away from the BBC, who has them on loan from Arthur Conan Doyle.
My lovely flatmate is in tech for a show, so I offered to write a fluff piece to cheer her up. She's a fan of domestic Johnlock. This is what happens.
xxx
"You don't just find a four year old," John attempted various breathing exercises pushed on him by his therapist in an attempt to not scare the slip of a girl hiding behind Sherlock's trench coat. She peered out, blinked large brown eyes at him, then disappeared back behind the infuriatingly smiling man with a flick of her braid.
Sherlock shrugged, a slow, full-bodied motion. "Well I did. One of the women from the crack house entrusted her to my care for the time being."
"So, when a woman from a crack house where you were supposedly 'under cover'-" John silenced Sherlock with a look when he opened his mouth to protest, "was high, you just made off with her child?"
"Good lord, John, I did not 'make off' with her child. The woman was clearly unable to take care of the girl for herself, and I volunteered my services."
"You really think you'll make a better parent?"
"No, I think you will."
xxx
It was exactly like the ill-advised tropical fish Sherlock had brought home after another one of their cases. Sherlock cooed over it in his way (which is to say, considered multiple experiments such as dropping nicotine patches into the tank to see what would happen) for three days, then John was left to clean up the mess. He fed it, watered it, checked the water chemical levels, then eventually said a short prayer before flushing it down the toilet. When he mentioned it to Sherlock, his flatmate had no idea what he was talking about. "Must have deleted it," was his brusque explanation.
John hoped to whatever being presided over 221B that Sherlock would not "delete" the information of his adopted ward. Not that he was exactly involved in the normal day-to-day of Ella's life. John had actually shooed him out of the administrative office when they were attempting to enroll her in kindergarten; how anyone could sneer so much at young children's artwork, he wasn't really sure, but it was definitely setting the headmaster on edge. With Sherlock out of the room, securing a beginning education for Ella was much simpler. She'd started inundating them with colouring book pages and her own sketches of her "family," and John had been dutifully posting them on the refrigerator.
It was one of Ella's attempts at drawing said family that left smudges all over the floor in the living room. She'd taken to lying across the rug in front of John's chair while she drew, curled up like a cat. Unsurprisingly, Sherlock tended to regard her with the detached curiosity of a scientist observing a strange new creature. Surprisingly, Ella did the same. But John she followed around like a silent puppy, always watching, millimeters away from being underfoot.
On this particular occasion, however, her usually lazy scribblings had started to become agitated, her marker bleeding through crossed-out tears in the paper onto the floor. John peered over her shoulder to see a bunch of half-drawn figures that had been crossed out, with arrows pointing all over the page. "FAMILY" was scrawled at the top, as usual, but this time it was followed by a question mark. "What do you have there, Ella?" he asked, trying to sound gentle to mask his concern.
Her brow was furrowed as she expanded her diagram. "We talked about our families today in class," she muttered, as frustrated as a four-year old could. "Everyone has a mummy and a daddy and a brother or sister and a dog. I'm trying to figure out who is who." She looked up at the skull for a moment, nibbling at the end of a purple marker, then asked, "Is that the dog or the brother?"
John paled, then turned it around so it wasn't staring at the girl then said, "Neither," in a choked voice.
Ella frowned, crossing something out. "Alice is Mummy, but she doesn't do what all the other girls' mums do. Is she still my mother then?" A shadowy figure whose label had been crossed out and rewritten four separate times stood off from the others, representing Ella's birth mother.
John bent down, picking up Ella's diagram with one hand and scooping her into his lap with the other. She curled into his chest, making herself small. John nearly choked at the curious image Ella had drawn of Sherlock with a collar and leash, clearly trying to figure out who in the house was the pet. "Of course she's still your parent," he stuttered a bit after clearing his throat. "So am I, and so is Sherlock," John told her, drawing each person and labeling them with simply their first names.
Ella looked up at him, confused. "Mr. Sherlock definitely doesn't act like the other daddies in the class," she told him.
He chuckled to himself, bouncing her on his knee a bit. "No, he definitely does not. He's less of a – ahem – daddy and more of a, well, a Sherlock."
Ella nodded. "I think I understand now." She slid off of his lap, dragging her drawing behind her. John went back to his book as Ella went back to sketching more serenely.
After another half hour or so, he got up to start dinner, and almost dropped right there when he saw she'd drawn Mrs. Hudson in the dog collar.
