Here it is: the long awaited (Ha, I wish!) chapter 5. Um…also, there are a lot of differences between the information in this chapter as opposed to all the rest. I haven't had the chance to go back and fix them all…I'm going to re-work the whole fic here eventually… when it's finished…but go for the info in this chapter…the rest of the story will follow in much the same vein. Sorry about the confusion!
I woke up in the middle of the night, covered in a cold sweat. My throat was raw from screaming and I heard the sound of pounding feet in the hall outside my room and the door was thrown open. Holmes, with Watson right behind him, was framed in the doorway of my room. The echo of my cry rang through it. "I'm a Mary Sue!"
"Good God, woman, I expected you to have a gun to your head!" Not surprisingly, both men looked rather put out to have been turned out of their beds at this ungodly hour of the morning for nothing more serious than what I am sure they considered to be female vapors.
"Sorry, nightmare. Was I really that loud?" Trying not to giggle was harder than it would seem, considering the look I was getting from those gray eyes. I could see why hardened criminals quailed before him, but he'd obviously never glared at a girl before; he looked like a moron.
"Yes, you really were that loud." Holmes grumbled as he went back off to bed. He would be grouchy the next morning. Watson was still standing in the doorway, looking at me as if I was going to either shatter or stand up and kill him.
"John, I'm fine. I promise. Go back to bed." I did my best to look sincere, and I think he bought it. In any event, he left. That was what I was after; I needed time to think.
A Mary Sue, for anyone who is not familiar with the term, is a female that takes on the perfect persona of where ever she is placed. In the Victorian London of Sherlock Holmes, for instance, Mary Sue would be a crack shot, an excellent detective, able to play the violin as well as the piano forte, discover the criminal or the case (or both) before Holmes even knew what he was looking for, as well as being beautiful, sexy, and all around perfect. Also, the character of the author's choice would invariably fall in love with Mary Sue. If that was what I turned into when I got sent back in time, I would shoot myself in the head and save Holmes and Watson the trouble. Wouldn't I?
Well, I thought, lets take stock, shall we? I had no musical talent whatsoever. At all. I had even gotten thrown out of a music class once; the teacher said I was hopeless. I refused to learn to shoot on principle: I wouldn't want anyone to shoot at me, so why should I learn to shoot at him or her? I always turned to the end of a mystery novel, to find out who did it, so that put me in the clear for solving Holmes' case for him. I personally didn't think that I had much, as far as looks went. Yeah, I had nice eyes, but that was as far as it went. They were blue. Not very impressive. My hair wasn't anything special, reaching down to the middle of my back and halfway between black and brown (so basically mud-colored) and it curled when it was not blown-dry. I was reasonably sure that there weren't any blow-dryers in Victorian London. It would curl. Tightly. I was very short, barely making 5'2" in my bare feet. That's without shoes on. The only thing really going for me was that I had really good vision. That wasn't really a turn on in my century, but hey, who knows? The only real thing that I wouldn't object to about being an MS was the romance involved. I hadn't had a serious boyfriend in a while, and I needed something. So if Holmes or Watson (who really wasn't as fat as most stories and pictures portray him to be) started hitting on me, I wouldn't object. Not that I expected it. Holmes thought that I was a nuscence, and Watson thought I was nuts. But most MS stories started out that way… Shaking myself, I decided that I had confused myself enough for one night, and prepared to go back to sleep.
Tomorrow would be an interesting day.
I woke up again when the sun hit my face at about seven o'clock. Unwilling to head off to my first day of work with small children without a decent shower, I went in search of the bathroom. The room that I found had a giant bathtub in the centre, but no shower. And it hit me again: I was in the 19th century. They didn't have showers then.
I took a fast bath, not wanting to spend the entire day freezing after a cold bath (I wasn't sure they had hot running water yet), and did my best to wash my hair while sitting down. It worked, but my hair was a mass of tangles. Tangles that were already starting to curl. Curses! Mayhap I would make good on my old threat to cut it all off. Ah well, food for thought. I dressed in the clothing that Mrs. Hudson had loaned me, having to ring her up to help me with the corset. I was really starting to hate this century.
When the rest of the house came in for the breakfast (hot buttered scones), I had my hair combed out if not put up. Holmes looked at me for a moment, before suggesting that I do something with the mop. Not his exact words but close enough. The look he gave me though, it was as if I had made him relive a memory, one that he enjoyed but didn't take out often. Weird. Very weird, but perhaps not unpleasant. Herm, I wasn't liking the train of my thoughts, I'd have to do something about it, later of course, now I had the prospect of a meal across from…oh dear perhaps I had better deal with the thoughts sooner. Well then again, I was a Mary Sue, what was the point of being a Mary Sue if one couldn't even act like one? Huh? No. Flirting with the Great Detective was not a good idea. Not only would it screw up the whole Mary Russell thing (who was as far from a Mary Sue as it was possible to be, baring the same first name), but I would have my heart broken in a century that I was unfamiliar with. Never a good idea, that; there weren't any Ben & Jerry's shops around to gain weight in in the nineteenth century. Sigh. Oh well. Maybe I would stumble over that burglar they were looking for. Mary Sues' were supposed to be good at that, weren't they?
The rattling of the newspaper brought me back into the real world. "Anything interesting?" I addressed the question to both of them, thinking that it would be Watson that would answer, but to my great surprise, it was Holmes who spoke up.
"Nothing of merit in the case at hand. Aren't you starting with Mr. Brown today?"
Holy crap, he was right! I'd forgotten between the bathroom and the breakfast table. I'm sure that I gave the both of them one of my famous deer-in-the-headlights looks as I dashed up the stairs to try and do something with my hair. Something that wouldn't make me look like a hooker in this time. I had never been good at getting it to do things it didn't want to do, and getting it to sit in a nice pile on the top of my head was not something that it would want to do. I swear, the mop had a life of its own sometimes.
My indistinct cursing at the mirror in the bathroom must have penetrated into the dining room, because the next thing I knew, Holmes was leaning on the doorframe, laughing at my feeble attempts at controlling the masses. Of my hair, of course. I had wondered, as I am sure most everyone else has, after reading the Mary Russell novels, where Sherlock Holmes had learned to do a woman's hair so well. On that rainy morning, I found out that his guinea pig in the matter was myself. Oh joyous day.
Let me tell you, ladies, he didn't start out all that good at hairdressing. He nearly put me sleep stroking the brush through my (insanely long and annoyingly curly) hair. I sat there with my eyes half closed hoping that he would never stop, and thinking that life as a Mary Sue really wasn't that bad, if this was what I got, when he started gently tugging on the mass of dark brown locks as he twisted it up. Mmmmmm, nice.
Until he jabbed my scalp with a wickedly sharp hairpin. "OUCH!" I jumped as the inch of pin was taken from its resting-place in my skin. I laughed as I looked in the mirror: Holmes was looking horror-stricken, the almost elegant twist was falling out around my ears, and I was due to leave for my first day with the kids in less than twenty minutes. Absurdly, it struck me as being incredibly, hilariously funny. After a moment of watching my helpless giggles, Holmes joined me, gripping the edge of the sink for support. He realized a heartbeat later how close to me that put him, his arm nearly around my waist as I was directly in front of him facing the mirror. I turned toward him, without conscious thought, and both of us froze, just looking at each other.
Then the spell, such as it was, was broken. I turned back to the mirror, taking the brush from his (trembling?) fingers, and got my hair up into something respectable. When I turned to leave, Holmes was already gone. I didn't know what had just happened, but it was not something that I was likely to forget anytime soon.
I heard a carriage pull to the door, and my stomach gave a funny lurch; my days as a working woman in Victorian London had begun.
A/N sorry for this having been so long in coming, and also for it being relatively short. I like it, although there isn't any actual plot yet. It is coming, you have my word. Review!