The woman pronounced the word "Fuck" in the way that only a native Scott could manage, but under that, he ran her voice through a regional linguistics program in his head, something else? …something?
"Tell me what the fuck you want or I call the police."
Ah! Florida.
"I'm looking for Doctor John Watson." Sherlock pushed himself up onto his good elbow with a grunt of pain. He let his eyes drift upwards to a pair of women's feet. Pink toenail polish, tasteful, self applied, no calluses, good arches, wore closed toed flats to work, shaved ankles, a shade darker than her bony feet, skirt then, that limited her to some professional job. Pale green scrubs, loose, but not too long, John's. He breathed in the scent of antiseptic and chalk, Oxford university t-shirt, old, and cut for a woman's figure, clearly her own.
He looked up finally into her face, her thick auburn hair was piled messily behind her head and little, half moon spectacles sat patiently on her nose. There was a ring on the hand holding the gun, about a year old, fastidiously polished.
"He's at work." she informed Sherlock dropping the gun a bit as he leaned his battered body against the doorframe.
"Perfect." Sherlock sighed.
"so what you doing breaking into our fla'?"
"I'm an old friend, he wouldn't mind." Sherlock waved a hand impatiently; it came away from his side bloody.
"Oh, you're hurt." She noticed with sympathy in her voice, he heard the safety click on, and she was kneeling, peering at his one demonically red grey eye.
"Can't go to a hospital," he admitted shakily, "I was hoping the good doctor cold lend a hand." Sherlock offered his most charming grimace which seemed to have the intended effect on the woman.
"I'll give him a ring, he's on call tonight, but I have a feeling…"
"It wasn't the entrance I had planned."
"No," she tapped her phone twice, speed dial.
It rang five times, the gun tapping impatiently against Mary's thigh.
This is Doctor John Watson's Mobile, leave a message and I'll get back to you as soon as possible.
BEEEEEEP
"John, it's Mare, call back when you get this, it's... you need to come home."
Mary disconnected the call.
She looked down at Sherlock for a long, thoughtful moment, holding the pistol in one hand and the iphone in the other. She sent a brief text with practiced fingers and turned off the screen.
"Come on, then," she said smiling through sleepy eyes, "upstairs with you."
"You just let me…" Sherlock struggled to stand, "in?"
She smiled with terrifying confidence, "I have a gun, and you have a broken arm."
"Sherlock Holmes." He grimaced down at her, he wanted to offer a hand but didn't.
"Doctor Mary Watson, and aren't you meant to be dead?" she regarded him carefully as he staggered past her and up the familiar stairs.
"Meant to be." He leaned on the banister.
"According to my husband." She seemed to see this inconsistency as some promising, if elusive new data.
"Well… I'm… not." He gasped as he struggled up the last step, leaning on the wall as Mary opened the door.
The living room of his old home was a comfortable and warm as ever. Except somehow completely different. There were touches of femininity here and there; a guitar lay across the couch and a beautiful telescope, longer than his arm aimed out the window over the London night. The pile of paper which had once been case notes and police reports and libraries of criminological history were now the great intellectual mechanics of Mary's PHD thesis. The wall had been repaired where Sherlock had once vandalized it and in place of the yellow grin hung a diploma in a tasteful gold frame.
"Doctor of cosmology and astrophysics." Sherlock wrinkled his nose in distaste and moved to collapse onto the familiar sofa which Mary hastily cleared of a pile of books and a silver laptop.
"John had it framed," she smiled bashfully up at the wall as she ran to the dryer and grabbed a clean towel. Returning she dropped beside the man who had been little but a myth five minutes prior and helped him to remove his coat. He gasped in pain as she slid his broken limb from the sleeve. His hand was turned a bit farther than it should have been able to and normally graceful fingers were swollen and curled uselessly against his palm.
"I'll get you some ice." She touched Sherlock's knee with concerned affection, handing him the towel for the cut on his side. "Just try to keep it still until John gets home."
"Thank you," he tucked the towel under his arm, then leaned back and watched her through one red eye. She moved around Baker Street with as much confidence and familiarity as he ever had, ducking into the freezer for a bag of frozen peas, which Sherlock gratefully accepted. Peeking idly into her telescope as she passed, opening a cupboard in the darkened kitchen and blindly retrieving two glasses.
"I'd always been disappointed that I hadn't met you, you know?" she said on her return from the kitchen, "John's stories are just so marvelous."
"Sorry if I'm not at my most brilliant." Sherlock grunted, crossing long legs on the coffee table.
"Tea or whiskey?"
"God! Whiskey." He breathed out, he hadn't chemically indulged in weeks and the thought of surrendering the tremendous weight of his brain to the will of alcohol was heavenly, besides, he rationalized, his arm really hurt.
Mary moved with alacrity and precision, pushing a sparkling crystal tumbler into his good hand.
"So you really are Scottish then?" Sherlock eyed the glass as if it was evidence of this.
"Don't tell John." She ordered, "Apparently it's Harry's drink." She raised her eyebrows scandalously.
"When did I ever do what John Watson said?" Sherlock swilled the scotch in his mouth savoring the warmth in his stomach, staring up at the familiar ceiling.
She laughed and moved the guitar. "You're lucky that tonight's the best view of Saturn we'll get for years or I wouldn't still be up waiting for the clouds to clear." She craned her neck to see out the window. "I like to do a bit of celestial photography, it's not exactly amateur anymore." She smiled and picked up her buzzing phone.
"John, love? … no… no… it's not a terribly big emergency … it's an old friend of your's… yes … yes love I know what time it is … look … john … he needs a doctor … no … he says hospitals won't do … I'm not sure …" she frowned at Sherlock, biting her lip as she listened to her husband rant, "john… he said his name is Sherlock Holmes." John's reaction was one of anger, and then the line went dead. Mary sucked her teeth and drained her glass.
"He'll be home in twenty minutes." She smiled, looking at Sherlock through the bottom of the tumbler. "So, are all the stories true then?"
"I wouldn't take Doctor Watson's prose as entirely factual, no."
"So you can't really do the thing?"
Sherlock smirked, eyes shut, crystal tumbler rolling on one thigh. "you're not a natural ginger, you were born in Perth, lower middle class, you were previously married but it ended badly, he left you, you lived in America for at least ten years, you took four years to finish your Phd, not record time, you just came back from Switzerland probably for your honey moon, delayed until after your thesis presentation, john wanted to go skiing but you just wanted to visit the large hadron collider. John knows about the marijuana habit and you know about his asphyxiaphilia."
Mary blushed and pulled the collar of her shirt up a bit.
"Oh and you like it."
"How'd you guess about the pot?"
"Resin under your fingernails," Sherlock sighed impatiently, pressing the cool glass to his bruised orbit, "my only question… why astrophysics?" he pronounced the word like it was a venereal disease.
Mary smiled shyly, pulling her socked feet up towards her bum and leaning dreamily against the back of the sofa. Out the window and four hundred and seventy six million miles away Saturn gleamed in the clearing night sky, "I've always wanted to know why the Earth goes round the Sun."