Disclaimer: 'Sherlock' belongs to all the important people that you know. Also, credit to Ariane DeVere for her series transcripts that had been extremely helpful.

linebreak linebreak linebreak linebreak linebreak

She remembered the lab they went to. It had been yellowed by years of smelly fumes, with suspicious spots on every wall and initials carved into desks by bored students. Apparently, the hospital got funds from somewhere and the sorry sight of old was no more.

"Well, a bit different from my day" she muttered under the breath, taking in the new equipment and an actually white ceiling.

"You have no idea" Mike chuckled.

A figure that had been hunched over a microscope in the shadows cut in: "Mike, can I borrow your phone? There's no signal on mine." The deep baritone was pleasant on the ears, Joan noticed absently, looking dispassionately at the pale man in a purple shirt. Is it silk? She channeled out their conversation in favor of checking out the new toys her colleagues got to play with. State of the art microscopes, a slide projector, and was it a DNA sequencing machine? If only her tremor didn't put at risk any fragile samples she might handle, she would have applied for a lab job right away.

She caught the last bit of dialogue, and instantly reached in her own pocket for the infamous phone. "Here, use mine."

The man looked mildly surprised. "Oh." He gave her a very intent stare before standing up to take the offered device. Something flashed through his silver eyes, akin to vague curiosity. "Thank you" he said rather flatly.

"It's an old friend of mine, John Watson" Mike chirped in.

"Afghanistan or Iraq?" the mystery-man asked off-handedly, turning to catch a better light to type.

Joan frowned, rewinding the conversation in her mind, to check if she somehow blacked-out and missed a huge chunk of presentations. Nope, she didn't. "Sorry?" She felt more than she saw the amused smile on Stamford's face.

Purple-shirt, as she decided to call him for now, seemed unperturbed. "Which was it, Afghanistan or Iraq?" He even glanced up from his texting, with a politely raised eyebrow. Oh, to hell with that. And with the smugness rolling off of Mike.

"Afghanistan. Sorry, how did you know?" The answer to that question was not meant to be, as a mousy woman came in with a coffee mug, eliciting a somewhat excited reaction from purple-shirt. The name-tag on her lab coat read 'Dr Hooper'.

"Ah, Molly, coffee. Thank you." As Joan took back her phone, the man continued with a hint of genuine surprise in his voice. "What happened to the lipstick?" Lipstick? At the same time, Joan's mind registered that it was the same Molly Stamford phoned back at the park.

"It wasn't working for me" Molly mumbled with an awkward smile. Oh dear, she's crushing on him. That's cute. It's been a long time since she had witnessed anything similar to a timid flirting. In a warzone, every emotion, every feeling is raw, even violent. Nobody has time to dance around each other, all hearts are worn on the sleeve, for friends, enemies and lovers alike to see and take. Everything made much more sense, days and nights had a unique flavor of life by just being so close to death. She wasn't used to veiled messages and subtle nuances of relationships anymore.

She must have missed something again, as the next question that registered with her was "How do you feel about violin?" Molly was already out of the lab, and Mike was doing a good impression of a cat that just ate the canary.

"Sorry, what?"

Purple-shirt was merrily typing away on a laptop as he elaborated "I play the violin when I'm thinking. Sometimes I don't talk for days on end. Would that bother you?" He looked intently at Joan, almost daring her to say 'yes'. When no reaction came from her, he went on "Potential flatmates should know the worst about each other." The smile that followed that statement could have been used as illustration for the entry 'false' in the dictionary. Oh, he doesn't really want you as flatmate, the persistent little voice informed her. But he can't turn you down in front of Mike if he wants to stay in his good graces and keep the access to the lab. Because hey, he's not a student, bossing around the coffee-doctor like this. Her inner self definitely had a thing with nicknames. That aside, she was intrigued. How could the guy possibly know about her service? And why was he so unsympathetic? Oh well, some people had a problem with a woman bearing a man's name, doing a supposedly man's job and being quite content with it. However, she was definitely not in the mood to put up with it.

So she went with her usual technic of dealing with narrow-minded idiots. She played dumb. "Oh, you told him about me, Mike?"

"Not a word" he said. He looked all too happy to just watch the show.

"Then who said anything about flatmates?" Her eyes didn't leave the lanky man for a second during that exchange.

"I did" purple-shirt informed the audience, while putting on his greatcoat. "Told Mike this morning that I must be a difficult man to find a flatmate for. Now here he is just after lunch with an old friend, clearly just home from military service in Afghanistan. Wasn't that difficult a leap."

She couldn't argue with that. "How did you know about Afghanistan?" It was a question she wanted an answer for. Depending on it, she would relax or move out of the country. She had dealt with men who knew a bit too much about her. Nothing good happened… to them.

Something of her musings must have transpired on her face, as the man stopped in the middle of wrapping his scarf around his neck, staring at her like a hawk at its prey. It lasted a few seconds, then he seemed to come to a decision, which must have been different from his original intention. "Got my eye on a nice little place in central London. Together, we ought to be able to afford it." He went to the door, passing Joan in a flurry of wool. "We'll meet tomorrow evening; seven o'clock. Sorry, gotta dash. I think I left my riding croping the mortuary" he finished in a poor imitation of confidential whisper.

Now that was just grand. "Is that it?" She turned fully to face him, standing at attention, her tone a study in skepticism. It got the desired attention. "We've only just met and we're gonna look at a flat?"

The confusion was quite clear at her opponent's face. "Problem?" God, he really thought he was doing me a great favor by accepting to consider me as a flatmate, didn't he? And I'm not even talking about skipping some steps, here…

"We don't know a thing about each other, I don't where we're meeting, I don't even know your name." Let's start by pointing out the obvious.

The brief silence and the small smile tugging at his lips didn't bode any good from her point of view. What followed was a mad-pace tirade, with an alarming amount of details about her recent history, which left Joan out of breath. Wait, why I am breathless when he's been the one talking?!

"That's enough to be going on with, don't you think?" To be honest, she wasn't thinking much at the moment. "The name's Sherlock Holmes and the address is two two one B Baker Street." The wink was so out of character, it almost sent Joan in a fit of laughter. "Afternoon."

Floored, she just mutely gasped at the closed door, trying to convey her state of mind to the other man in the room. "Yeah, he's always like that" Mike peeped cheerfully.

linebreak linebreak linebreak linebreak linebreak

She really should talk to Ella about memory problems. The trip back to the bedsit couldn't be more blurry in her mind. The meaning of a text sent by the now-named purple-shirt was lost on her too. "If brother has green ladder, arrest brother. SH" What? A quick search on internet pegged the number as belonging to NSY Detective Inspector G. Lestrade. Well, good to know. Another search on Sherlock Holmes (she messed up the spelling a few times before getting there) led her to a rather stern-looking website, which kept her glued to the screen well past midnight.