A.N.: I know it's never actually said explicitly in the show, but I always imagined Mrs Turner's 'married ones' as a lesbian couple. I'm not sure why...
Genre(s): Romance/Humour
Warning: One use of strong language
Disclaimer: Don't own Sherlock
The Married Ones
"Hey, Hyacinth, what do you think about these- what the fuck are you doing?"
Belinda Trent stopped in her tracks in the doorway between the living room and the kitchen, still holding a colour scheme that was destined to give them the new colour of their car, when she laid eyes on her wife engaged in a rather peculiar activity.
"I'm bored!" Hyacinth groaned, throwing another dart at the wall. She seemed to have accumulated a number of the tiny projectiles, more than Belinda had thought that they had in the flat, and was attempting to create two large letters in their wall with them: ER.
"So you're throwing darts at the wall?" Belinda sighed, dropping the colour scheme on the armchair and walking over to where her wife sat, perched on the end of the coffee table with another dart poised in her hand.
"It seemed appropriate at the time," Hyacinth mumbled, getting ready to throw the next dart, but deciding better of it and dropping her arm onto her leg with a sigh that made her sound like she was deflating. "I haven't had a job in so long," she groaned, stabbing the dart into the coffee table and placing her hands over her face.
Belinda suppressed the urge to flinch at the dull thud the action made – and the fact that there was now a hole, another hole, in their coffee table – and reached up to rub her wife's back.
"I know," she simpered, "but something will come up. You'll see."
"Hmph," Hyacinth huffed, suddenly standing up quickly and looking around her.
Hyacinth Butler was a tall woman; she reached nearly six foot in flats and always seemed to be wearing shoes with either heels or thick soles – Belinda often joked that she would get neck-ache from having to look up so much. Despite this, Hyacinth was worryingly thin; she used her job as a freelance writer as an excuse to 'forget' to eat, and more often than not Belinda was forced to shove food down her protesting throat. When she didn't have a job, Hyacinth was content to eat – and eat, she did, even things that wouldn't necessarily be considered food by normal people.
Yet, for Belinda, it was difficult to work out which phase of her wife's work cycle she hated the most: for, when she had a job, she starved herself to near collapse; when she didn't, she got so terrifying bored, Belinda had to hide all of the sharp objects in the flat lest the curtains appear to have been attacked by a clowder of angry felines.
She thought that she had hidden the darts well; clearly not well enough.
"Aha!" Hyacinth suddenly exclaimed, rushing to the coat rack just inside the front door. She whipped her long, black coat – a gorgeous, warm garment that fell to her ankles – off of the rack, and threw it over her shoulders.
"I'll annoy Anthea!" she beamed over at Belinda.
"Hyacinth," Belinda sighed, rubbing her eyes tiredly. She must have been bored if it had got this far. "Anthea is a busy woman, she's practically-"
"The British government, yes, I know," Hyacinth grinned, a mischievous glint twinkling in her eye. "But my older sister is always so much fun to annoy."
With that, she wrenched the front door open and swept out with an impressive swish of her coat.
"Just don't get in trouble with her-" Belinda began, but the door slammed before she could finish, "boss," she added feebly.
A.N.2: I chose that particular pattern for the darts because in the audio commentary for The Great Game, Mark Gatiss said that in the original books, Holmes was shooting 'VR' in the wall for Victoria Regina, so I decided to use 'ER' for Elizabeth.
