For Day 7 of Sherlolly Week 2022: "Please don't do this." Rated K.


He'd once told Irene Adler that he never begged. She'd insisted she could make him do it twice.

Fast forward five years, to the day he'd been forced to beg Molly Hooper not to hang up the phone. To tell him she loved him.

"Please don't do this." she'd begged him in return. But, ultimately, she'd capitulated, but not until after defiantly demanding that he say it first.

And he had. Twice. Once just to say it, to save her (as he thought at the time) from certain death. The second time, however, had been a revelation. Not to Molly, who'd believed him to just be humoring her, but to himself. And he'd made sure to tell her that, to share that truth with her the very first opportunity he had.

And now they were married and had two children and a third on the way, and once again Sherlock Holmes was in over his head. Begging. Pleading. Desperate.

"Please don't do this," he implored the imperious, impervious form standing statue-like in front of him. Glaring. Unmovable as stone. "Please, don't. Just don't."

With all the dignity and stubbornness he was able to summon - and it was quite a lot, as Sherlock knew from painful experience - Phineas Mycroft John Holmes, age two-and-a-bit, shook his head 'no', gripping tightly to the edge of the bathroom sink as his father once again tried to manhandle him into the tub where his giggling sibling, Eleanor Mary Martha Holmes, sat amongst the floating toys and mounds of bubbles.

Why, Sherlock thought with mounting despair, was it always his night for giving baths that his son decided to act up?