Today's line: "Wasn't it even more frightening?"
Katie Moriarty arrives back at Aidan's flat halfway through the third Sherlock Holmes program; she hums to herself as she drops her bag and coat just inside the door, spots the two of them curled up on the sofa with the laptop and squeals. "Ooh!" she shrieks. "Sherlock!"
Aidan sits up and looks around. "You know it?" he asks.
"My sister's married to a Muggle," she elaborates. "She watches them with him and passes the good ones on to me. You know there's a telly in my room? You can use that for series two if you want, the screen's bigger than this thing."
Dylan gapes at her. "You know about this teller-vision thing?" he asked, sounding spellbound.
Katie rolls her eyes. "You've been flatting with me for eighteen months now and you didn't notice that I watch television? Flattering, Dyll."
The Chaser shrugs, and so Katie shoves Aidan's feet further up the sofa, sits down and watches the rest of the episode with them. Oliver doesn't react to the odd line that she says before the actor, but when she whispers her own surname in time with the Czech gallery-owner he sits up across Aidan to look at her.
"Hang on," he says slowly. "Moriarty?"
She holds up her hands innocently. "No relation, I swear," she says brightly. "It's actually a fairly common name."
After a further half hour of listening to her quote the show as it's happening, Oliver looks at her and grins. "You know, you'd get on really well with my flatmate, Isabel," he says.
Indeed, Isabel laughs delightedly when he recounts the tale later that night. "A woman of my own heart," she says, her eyes full of mirth. "You should invite her over one day."
"Although," Oliver adds, swallowing his massive gulp of tea, "there was that terrifically frightening moment when we realised that her surname was the same as the ultra-creepy villain's. But that was alleviated slightly when she started reciting his lines along with him."
Isabel frowns. "Wasn't it even more frightening?" she asked. "That she knows the guy's lines and has the same name?"
"Well, if there was a correlation, she'd hardly make it so obvious," Oliver reasons. "Besides, it's Katie. And she knew all of Sherlock's lines, too."
They sit in cheerful silence for a few more moments, only broken by Isabel's little whimper of disappointment when the bottom half of her digestive biscuit collapses and crumbles wetly into her teacup.
"You know," she ventures once the entire cup of ruined tea has gone down the drain, "I don't know how you're going to play the Donegal Dragons again, now that you're on such good terms with at least half their team."
Oliver shrugs. "It's only the League. Nothing like a bit of competition between friends. Honestly, I don't see anything changing – despite the number of people who've approached us thinking one of us is going to let the other win for the celebratory sex, or something."
Isabel laughs. "Well, one of you is going to win, anyway," she commiserates, "so the celebratory sex is a given." Oliver smirks as he watches her head tip speculatively sideways. "And, desperately as I'm trying not to think about it, I can't really imagine either of you withholding sex. Not the way you are with each other."
"We can stop that line of conversation now," Oliver offers her. "We don't have to worry about playing the Dragons for another few months."
She nods, tapping the kettle with her wand again to set it back on the boil. "I imagine the media will have a field day, though," she muses.
Oliver sighs. "We'll get through it."