From Wordwielder: First snowfall

==Day 2: The Soldier's December==

Watson chose to walk home from his locum practice—better to save the cab fare when the cold air was dry enough not to plague his shoulder. 1 Shops were beginning to array themselves in festive greenery, and it cheered his spirits to see it. He had missed only two Christmases abroad—one in India and the other on the Orontes—but this time of year seemed more precious to him now than ever, even now, his second December back in Britain.

He was studying the decorations of a shop across the street when something in the air caught his eye, white and feathery. Snow!

The winter he'd returned to England had been a bad one. He and Holmes had scarcely moved into 221B when the worst blizzard of the century hit the lower part of the island, assaulting the British with ice age-like fury for two days. 2 Winter had not been kind to him or his injured shoulder that year. By contrast, the next winter, that of 1881-'82, had been mild. There hadn't been enough snow to make a fuss over; just a chill damp that had been just as harsh on his wound as the previous winter had been. 3

And now large, fluffy snowflakes filled the air, drifting gently from the iron-grey sky.

Watson grinned—his first proper first snow in four years. Tired old London was transforming into something magical. He wanted to quicken his steps, see if Holmes was still home and if he had ever entertained any such sentiments and, if not, if he could be convinced to do so...

But the beauty around him was too precious to hurry through it. Holmes could not completely understand, anyway—no one could understand the wonder of a first snow, when one had been two Decembers without it, unless they experienced it for themselves.

The softness, the quiet, the beauty… in this moment, it belonged to Watson alone.


1 Watson's only known injury in STUD is his shoulder; in SIGN, 6 or 7 years later (depending on your chronology), he has what seems to be a recent injury in his leg. William Baring-Gould (at least, I'm pretty sure it was him) speculates that Watson was injured two separate times but, in an ironic twist, with the same kind of bullet—it's one Baring-Gould headcanon that I actually like. So just now, Watson isn't walking with a limp yet.

2 For real, there was a LONG, bad blizzard in Great Britain in January 1881, bad enough that it has its own Wikipedia article, I kid you not! Look up "Blizzard of January 1881" (no, that's not actually where I got my information from; I know better than to use Wiki as my sole source!).

3 And the winter of 1881-'82 really wasn't much to speak of. 1883 was when it got snowy again, and the 1880s in general had pretty bad winters. Poor Watson would have had a hard time of it.


A/N: So, last year, I got this same prompt from someone else and wrote a Mary story out of it. I said in the A/N for that story that the obvious response to this prompt was Watson, so I went with the India-born Mary instead. This year, it was Watson's turn!

And yes, I did a bunch of weather research for 318 words of fic. Sue me.

Oh, and the title came from the Mariah Carey song. :D That's why I said I make no apologies—especially because Holmes would probably hate that song, lol.

(Also, thanks for the congrats re: my job! It's really exciting 'cos it's my first full-time job, my first job out of college, and a job that actually uses what I learned in college! And I have fun doing it! ...it's just the scheduling that makes it not-the-dream-job… :P )