I'm sorry this has taken so long, but the first Chapter 4 disappeared off of my hard drive. This is a rewrite, and if anyone finds any mistaked, please let me know in a review!

Chapter 4

Pip woke me up the next morning, or rather, just later the same morning. Always a morning person, our Pip. She came baring breakfast, which was in her favor when I wrenched the door open and glared bleary-eyed at my friend.

"What time is it?" I muttered as she pushed by me and into my apartment. I heard her moving around in the kitchen, and hoped she was making coffee. If you haven't picked up on it yet, I did not function well with out that liquid in my body. But I digress.

"Eleven thirty," was the calm reply from the kitchen. I looked at Holmes, whose head had popped over the top of the couch and shrugged. He raised a brow at me, then stood, making his way to the shower. "There's a bag of clothes from Richard on the floor in my bedroom," I told him as he went out, carefully looking anywhere but at me. I looked down at myself: black Tee-shirt with the New York skyline and a pair of boxers that featured Eeyore. I rolled my eyes at him, and went to join Pip, all the while muttering about Victorians and their ridiculous mannerisms.

"So what are you going to do about him?" Pip asked me, jerking her head in the direction of the bathroom.

"What do you mean? I can't do anything until you and Frank can figure out how to get him back to where he came from. Or should I say 'when' he came from?" To be honest, I hadn't thought about what I was going to do with Holmes. I just figured that he'd live on my couch until he got a job or walked through another field. Apparently, that wasn't a good enough a plan of action.

"So, you're going to let him go when Frank and I can fix it?" Pip fixed me with that patented 'yeah-right-whatever' look of hers and waited for my answer.

Which had to be yes. I couldn't very well keep him here against his will could I? And why would I even want to? It wasn't like I liked him or anything. Except that I couldn't breathe when he looked at me sometimes. And he was nicer to me than any of my old boyfriends were. Oy yey. But I couldn't do any less than the right thing, so when the time came, I would smile and wave as he walked back through the field that would send him back home to the people he loved and the job that he did so well. And if I came back to my apartment and cried myself out, well, it would be in the privacy of my own fire escape, so who would know?

I looked back at Pip and said very quietly, "Of course." She said nothing, and if she guessed at the internal dialogue that caused such unexpected pain, she kept it to herself all these years. Instead, she looked up at the doorway and grinned. I spun in my chair and faced Holmes, who looked just a bit ridiculous in the borrowed jeans and pullover.

They were both looking at me like I should be doing something instead of sipping coffee in my PJ's. I looked right back at them, or well, back at Pip because I can't look at two people at once, and she rolled her eyes disgustedly at me. Going over my head and speaking to Holmes, she said,

"Hello, I'm Pip Farmington, a friend of Lizzy's. I'm afraid that your being here is rather my fault…we were supposed to be doing the experiment that brought you here in an abandoned alleyway…we must have miscalculated…I'm awfully sorry about that…" She stuck out a hand to shake (I could have warned her that that wasn't what was going to happen, but she didn't look at me) and found him kissing it in the next instant. She blushed scarlet to the roots of her hair. I snorted into my coffee. Holmes looked at me weird and went on with the conversation.

"Miss Farmington, all is forgiven." He began magnanimously. "While I may have been rather angry when I first arrived," I interrupted with a snort and he glared at me. Again. "I now regard this as nothing more than a lesson on human nature. At some point today, Miss Elizabeth's brother is going to contact me with a problem that the local constabulary is finding trying, and I shall do my best to aid them. This will be an experience I shall never forget, for better or worse." His words were impressive, and seemed to reassure Pip. I would imagine that she wouldn't be thrilled at breaking the space-time continuum, and his casual brush off of what had happened was exactly what she needed to hear. She scooped up my laptop and asked if he would like the technical side of what had happened to him. He, of course, said that he would.

"Ok, here's what happened. Frank owned up and told me that he was playing dice with his roommate on the same table as my laptop," she stopped and gestured to my own, which was sitting in her lap. He nodded. "I had been working on this program that would make it possible to move through time as you move through space." Holmes' eyebrows rose, but he didn't interrupt. "Well, the short version of it is that Frank dropped the dice on the keyboard in a pattern that I hadn't tried before. You see, I hadn't been able to make the machine work before this. The pattern, which is 9 on the number pad, 'Q', and 'H' all at the same time and with the same amount of pressure applied to each, was the key to getting the program to function correctly. That created the electromagnetic field that you walked through. If the program had been working exactly as I had designed it to, you would have landed in Frank's dorm room. The reason you didn't is because Frank spilled his Sprite on the laptop when he realized what he'd done, which shorted out the entire thing. So now my computer is fried, and I cant get you back until I fix the program and the computer. Sorry." She finished in one breath and waited for the explosion that she'd obviously expected.

In stead, he asked her simply, "Do you think you will be able to send me home?" he glanced at me while he was saying this, and I shrugged, not knowing what he wanted of me.

"Yes, absolutely." Pip told him, obviously relieved. "I just don't know when."

"Well I shall just have to be satisfied with that. As it happens, more time will be helpful if I am to help Richard solve his case." He glanced at me again, and I swear I saw him wink. The Great Detective was certainly unbending in this environment.

Pip cut through my thoughts with, "Can I take yours?"

"My laptop? Yeah, go for it. Just don't let Frank spill soda on mine, ok?" Pip smiled and packed up the computer. "Your going now?" I asked, surprised. Pip was the biggest Sherlock Holmes groupie I'd ever met; I was sure she would be using every moment she got with him to pump him for information.

"Yeah, I need to get this problem fixed as soon as possible. Ta." With that, Pip swept out of my apartment, leaving Holmes and me alone again.

"Well," I said, trying to break the silence that had somehow become awkward, "I hope Richard gets here soon; I want to know what case Mr. Bigshot cop cant handle by himself."

Holmes only looked at me, saying, "Indeed."