A/N: This is a canon divergence, the eleventh fic in a series starting just after The Reichenbach Fall. There's a full list of fics in order on my profile. Everyone's as in-character as possible, but some pairings are different from the current seasons 3 and 4, and so, therefore, is a tiny Watson. Faves, follows, reviews, abusive PMs, etc,. all welcome ;)

When she was having a screaming meltdown, tiny Charlie Watson seemed to weigh about four tonnes and have at least ten arms and legs.

It was Greg and Melissa's wedding cake that had set her off this time. One look at the purple sugar pansies festooned over all three of its tiers, and Charlie had decided she wanted them. All of them. Right now. The fact that the cake wasn't hers and hadn't even been cut yet didn't matter, and the promise of cake later doesn't mean much when you're seventeen months old. Consequently, John had hauled her out of the reception hall, kicking and screeching the whole way, to calm her down. Though, he thought to himself, expecting her to calm down any time this year might be asking too much. A full five minutes after he'd closed the hall door behind them with one shoulder, she was still howling.

"Hey," he said, struggling to keep a hold on her as she fought him with all her strength, scratching at his arms and kicking her heels back into his thighs. "We've been through this, Charlotte. Nobody wants to be around you when you put on your banshee act. Including me."

Judging from Charlie's reaction, even she didn't want to be around herself at moments like these. John, beginning to feel desperate, looked around for something to distract her with. But her backpack of toys, bottles and other paraphernalia was back in the hall tucked behind Molly's chair at the head table, and there didn't seem to be much else on hand out here: plush carpet, a tattered-looking Louis XV chair in silver and gold brocade, and an oak sideboard underneath a wide, low window, adorned only with a vase of red and white roses. Nor was there any chance of ducking home to get something to entertain her with. For reasons best known to herself, Melissa had decided she wanted her wedding at Arndale Hall, a sixteenth-century mansion located squarely in the middle of the North York Moors National Park. The wedding gathering was very small—some thirty guests in all. Almost everyone had arrived at Arndale late in the previous afternoon, stayed the night at the Hall, and weren't due to travel home until the following day. It was New Year's Eve, and nobody particularly wanted to be on the roads.

"Please stop," John muttered to his daughter. Reasoning that roses in December had to be fake ones, he pulled one out of the nearby vase, confirmed the plastic stem had no thorns, and tried to hand it to her. "Here, Charlie, have a flower…"

Charlie grabbed the rose stem, then threw it so far that it bounced off the chair and onto the floor.

"Okay. Fine, don't play with the flower." John jiggled her in his arms, wondering if it was worth letting her play with his expensive watch just for a bit of peace and quiet. But before he could decide, the double-doors to the reception hall creaked open. He looked up to see Greg Lestrade come out, furtively carrying what John assumed to be a tissue bunched in one hand.

"I thought you were-" The rest of John's question was swamped by Charlie's wailing.

"Cutting the cake, yeah; we just did it," Greg said easily.

"Sorry I had to miss it."

"You didn't miss much—never understood why people have to stand around and watch the cake-cutting, actually. Anyway, there's plenty left… hey, Charlie, cheer up—it might never happen, kid. Got this for you."

Before John could stop him, he handed Charlie the half-piece of wedding cake he'd been holding. She looked at it and then up at him with huge brown eyes that were still overbrimming with tears, then grabbed it in one chubby fist and smooshed it into—though mainly onto—her mouth. The inevitable compromise was instant silence.

"That's the way, all over your dad's best suit," Greg chuckled, as chunks of marzipan landed on John's lapel.

John picked up the largest piece of icing and put it in his mouth, then brushed the remaining cake crumbs onto the carpet. "Stop spoiling her," he protested mildly. "You can't just give her something nice every time she looks like she's about to cry."

"Course I can," Greg replied. "She's not mine, so I get to fill her with sugar, hype her up, and give her back. That's the way these things work."

"You, Sherlock and Harry are just as bad as one another, you know that?" And let's not even start on Mycroft making Molly and me look bad by buying Charlie Christmas presents that cost more than our car.

"Good to hear we're all doing our jobs properly," Greg said, unperturbed. "Especially since the workload's about to triple and Charlie's about to turn into a green-eyed monster. How long to go now before the twins come along?"

"Eight weeks tomorrow, on the calendar," John said. "I was a bit worried it was going to be Christmas night. She kicked Molly."

Greg winced. "Kids always have to spoil a good day like that."

"Yeah, bit like now." John forced himself to brush off the nagging memory of that particular occasion—the look on Molly's face when he'd scooped Charlie up after she'd kicked her and then thrown herself onto the kitchen floor to scream. Molly hadn't said anything, but the look in her eyes had: Please don't hit her.

He wasn't going to hit her. And he didn't know how he felt about Molly assuming he was.

"How's Sherlock coping in there?" Since Sherlock was Greg's groomsman and John wasn't, he'd been temporarily marooned at the far end of the wedding table, an arrangement that had only lasted until everyone had eaten and got up to hop tables among themselves. Still, working a room full of half-drunk wedding guests had never been Sherlock's natural milieu, and he'd been curiously quiet throughout most of the proceedings so far.

Greg smiled. "He's fine. Hardest job was getting him up there in the first place, but last I saw, Molly and Liz have him well in hand." Liz Brennan, Greg's new mother-in-law, was the Mistress of Boarders at King's Ely, a staunch second-wave feminist, and an expert in Medievalism. She was also almost eleven months younger than himself, though he wasn't fond of remembering this. But one thing she wasn't was shy, and had readily agreed to become, at least for one weekend, Sherlock's new best friend.

"Ah, with a bit of luck, someone will be murdered, in the billiard room, with the lead pipe, and we'll have a crime to solve," John said.

"Speak for yourself," Greg said, grinning. "Of all the things I plan to be doing tonight, I promise you, solving a crime won't be one of them."

These sort of knowing moments were rare and far-between with John and Greg, since Sherlock was usually around to huff and complain at any indication that either of his friends had an active sex life. John laughed.

"Well, congratulations, anyway," he said, slapping Greg's shoulder with sudden warmth. "She's perfect. And it's been a long time since you've had something..." He stopped himself, having been about to say, it's been a long time since you've had something nice happen to you. "Anyway," he said, after an embarrassed pause, "so what are you doing out here?"

"Well…" Greg's hand twitched toward his jacket pocket. "I was going to sneak out for a quick smoke while Mel and Hayley are distracted. But having a look outside, I think I'll pass."

John had so far been paying attention to Charlie's tantrum and not the view out the window. It had been snowing when most of the guests had arrived at Arndale Hall early the evening before, and he had an idea that it had been snowing as they'd prepared for the ceremony that morning. But there was a big difference between a layer of white powder and the complete white-out that he could see out the window now. It was fully dark already, and drifts of hard snow were already creeping up to the low bay windows.

"Oh, God," John said, actually taking a step back.

"More snow than you'll ever see in London," Greg said wryly. "Good thing we don't leave for our honeymoon until Thursday."

"Yeah, I don't think anybody will be setting foot out of doors tonight, put it that way." John hoisted Charlie, who was still hiccuping over her cake, up on his hip. "Anyway," he said, "will you mind her for a couple of minutes? I'm not taking her into the men's room with me." He promptly handed Charlie over to Greg, feeling secretly gratified when the mushy remains of her piece of cake landed on his jacket. "Where am I going, anyway?"

Greg, handing the soggy cake back to Charlie, nodded in the right direction. "Down the hall, past the other reception doors, to your right," he said.

"Thanks. I'll be back."

Over the morning, John had become dimly aware that the Lestrade-Brennan wedding wasn't the only one happening at Arndale Hall that New Year's Eve. At first he assumed the event going on in the larger reception hall next door was a standard New Year's Eve party, but the strangers wandering around the corridors in wedding suits had put to rest that idea. As he walked past the doors to the other hall in search of the bathrooms, he could hear the usual sounds of merriment: clinking glass, laughter, the occasional screams of playing children.

While most of Arndale Hall was made up to be as antiquated as possible—with appropriate mod cons, of course—John was taken aback to find the men's bathroom more fitting in style to a Soho nightclub than a heritage building. In particular, there were no actual sinks, the taps running straight down into recesses in the floor. He figured out how to run them eventually and was drying his hands with a paper towel when, from close outside the door, a shrill feminine voice stopped him dead in his tracks.

"What on earth made you think this is acceptable? We could all die!"

He paused, the wad of mushy towel still in his hands. The male voice who responded was muffled, and he couldn't make any clear words out. But he had no trouble making out the reply.

"Yes, it IS! My husband and I paid eighty pounds a head for you to serve our guests raw chicken!"

Alarm bells. John had also had some sort of chicken and pesto combination half an hour before. So had at least ten other wedding guests, including Melissa, Sherlock and Molly. John had thought the chicken tasted fine. Better than fine. Certainly nowhere near raw. But salmonella was unpredictable, and you never knew when you were about to be snowed in with twelve cases of it to deal with. And if Molly… well, that didn't bear thinking about at the moment, but the least he could do was get a better idea of exactly what was going on out there. He opened the door slightly, edging next to the sink so he was at an angle to see the woman speaking in the corridor outside.

She was none other than the bride herself, and her beauty literally made John gape. She was tall and pale, with curled chestnut hair cascading from under her wedding veil and tiara and over her bare shoulders. High cheekbones, huge grey eyes, and a decolletage that could have been carved out of marble. Melissa's wedding dress was a simple concoction of cream French lace and silk; the stranger's dress was a strapless ivory sheath, positively blinding onlookers with the amount of diamentes on the bodice and trailing a good two feet along the floor behind her. John didn't particularly care what was in her bouquet and wouldn't have been able to tell if he did, because she was just then waving it around so violently that he half-expected her to start hitting the man in front of her with it. By striking contrast, he was swarthy, middle-aged and a good three inches shorter than her. Judging by his dark, utilitarian smock and hairnet, was the chef in charge of the kitchen.

"Madam," he tried, lacing his fingers together anxiously. "I can personally vouch for the quality of your guest's meals. Our chefs are—"

"It was raw!"

"Yes, you've said; but, Madam, if you could please show me—"

"Are you calling me a liar?"

"No," he said, though John knew he was using all of his energy to prevent himself from reaching out and strangling her. "No, madam, but if the chicken was inedible, then surely—"

"I will sue you." She brought down her bouquet like a hatchet, but although the man cringed, it seemed to be a glancing blow. "Do you understand? I will sue you, and it won't just be to recoup the ridiculous cost of this reception, which, by the way, was middling to average before that revolting main course…"

Wow. I'd love to meet the man who willingly married her. But immediately, John shook himself. All this was none of his business, aside from a possible impending food poisoning outbreak, and if he left Charlie with Greg any longer he'd give her more sugar, or maybe even a puppy this time. Trying his best to act as if he hadn't been eavesdropping, he pushed the bathroom door open with both hands and made his way back down the hall, not looking at either the bride or the chef as he passed them. All he registered was a vague glimpse of ivory tulle dress and a snatch of her shrill voice: The thing that makes me really angry is, you've ruined the most important day of my life, a day I'll never, ever get back again. And you don't even care! I'm reporting you to the Food Standards Agency on Monday…

It was not the last time Dr. John Watson saw Elizabeth Hayden, but it was the last time he saw her alive.