Chapter Text
“So I was thinking later, maybe we could—” Harry’s saying to Timothy Murray from Joan’s year, and the boy’s staring at Harry, entranced.
“Excuse me,” Joan bites out and grabs Harry’s arm, because kids at their school always stare at Harry, but usually’s with a dangerous mix of confusion and disgust. Every now and then, someone stares at Harry like he’s the most beautiful thing in the world, and that means Harry’s being a bloody idiot again.
She drags him into an empty classroom and slams the door behind them. “What the hell d’you think you’re doing, Harry?”
Harry glares at her with glowing, beautiful amber-yellow eyes. “I was talking to a hot bloke. What the fuck are you doing?”
Joan crosses her arms across her chest. “Put your bloody eyes away, Harry. What were you even thinking? Are you fucking mental?”
“You—”
“Now, Harry!”
Harry bites his lip and stares defiantly at her, but the light in his eyes slowly fades away until they’re completely normal, just a murky hazel. “I wanted him to like me,” he mutters.
“Brilliant,” Joan snaps. “D’you want him to report you to the headmaster? Me and mom, too?”
“This isn’t bloody Dark Ages, Joan!” Harry’s eyes flash yellow, but this time it’s involuntarily. “Why are you always so afraid? Everybody knows we exist now, and what we are—”
“They are the ones who’re still afraid of us,” Joan growls. “Two bloody words for you, Harry: Detainment. Bill. You want to be hunted down and have a number tattooed onto you? They’re talking about forbidding us to leave the country, for fuck’s sake.”
Harry crosses his own arms across his chest and draws himself to his full height, which is still an inch shorter than Joan. “Just because you’re all normal—”
“It’s got nothing to do with you being queer,” Joan hisses, and something in Harry’s eyes shrinks back.
“Thank you for proving my point,” he says coldly, but his voice shakes.
Joan breathes and tries to keep calm. “Harry. For fuck’s sake, it attracts attention. We can’t afford that, can’t you understand that?”
Harry lifts an eyebrow. “Being gay or being a fairytale monster?”
“You dyeing your hair pink!” Joan explodes. “D’you even know, everybody in this school knows who you are, what’s your name? Faggy Harry, that's what they call you, everybody knows you, with all your parties and getting into fights all the time, you do your bloody best to stand out whenever you can—”
“You’re a fucking bitch, Joan,” Harry growls, eyes filling with furious tears. He yanks on her sleeve, tugs it up roughly. “Look at you, a fucking coward just like mum. Shaving your fur now, are we?”
“It’s not normal for girls, everybody was staring at me.” Joan tears herself away and smooths her sleeve back down over the light stubble on her forearm. “Mum said—”
“Mum’s a fucking lunatic and you know it.” Harry swipes angrily at his eyes. “Just because she’s gotten so fucking paranoid she won’t even leave the house, it doesn’t mean you and me have to have the same kind of shit life.”
“The Detainment Bill—”
“Wake the fuck up, Joan, it’ll never pass through,” Harry bites out. “Everybody’s saying it’s inhumane, and nobody uses that word lightly since the war.”
Joan exhales slowly. She’s so tired. Of having this discussion with Harry over and over again, of being so worried all the time. “Even if it doesn’t,” she says, “that won’t change anybody’s mind. It’s so fucking idiotic to flaunt it, Harry. Don’t tell me you don’t see that.”
Harry swallows and closes his eyes. “If I can handle being called arse bandit in the streets,” he says thickly, “I can handle being called rabid dog, or whatever the fuck is the latest word they’ve made for us.” He takes a crumpled tissue out of his pocket and blows his nose loudly.
“You’re my brother,” Joan says helplessly.
“You have your life.” Harry tucks the tissue away and straightens up. “I have mine.”
“It’s not as simple as that,” Joan mutters, and Harry ignores her.
“If you’ll excuse me,” he says, turning and striding towards the door. “I have a bloke to get back to.”
(It’s a fight that never ends, really, not even after mum dies, or when the Detainment Bill does go through, slightly more humane now, despite Thatcher’s reign of terror ending just a couple of years earlier, or after they’ve both gone off to college, or when Joan leaves for her first tour abroad with a large supply of depilation cream and bottles of emergency Valium carefully packed away in her duffel, while Harry’s playing a tortured artist in a dumpy flat in Croydon. Joan wants her life to be as normal as possible; Harry’s long since resigned himself to an uncertain existence of being true to himself. And the fight never ends.)
***
British Army pays for Joan’s college, and that’s more than she ever expected. She’s painfully aware that there’s no way in hell she’ll pass the medical exams without anyone taking a look at her blood and noticing that the cells don’t look at all human. Still, there’s an unsupported rumour of the Royal British Army finding werewolves useful, whatever that means, as long as they don’t flaunt it and don’t expect to be treated like actual people.
It’s a raw deal, but it’s the only way to get her degree. Even in the worst case, living without having to actively hide herself all the time might actually make for a pleasant change, as long as she makes it out alive.
Thing is, halfway through Sandhurst, she’s pulled out of training in the middle of the drills and deposited in a waiting room, clutching her file and studiously not thinking about Harry or mom or what’ll happen to her medical degree or how those rumours were just rumours and there’s no guarantee that they won’t just stamp her with the identification number she’s spent the last eight years trying to avoid and take her degree away and who the hell’s going to employ a bloody werewolf or rent her a flat anyway—
“Watson,” a clear voice says from behind the open door of an office, and Joan snaps out of it. “Come in.”
Major Jemima Sholto will eventually turn out to be everything Joan’s always wanted to be: tall, strong, commandeering, and gloriously human. Right now, she smells like hot metal and well-used leather, a sharp and lovely scent that would make Joan weak in her knees if she could feel her body at all.
And she’s kind, in a restrained, unassuming way; she tells Joan to sit and then folds her sun-browned hands over Joan’s file and calmly looks at her for a long moment.
“Relax, Watson,” she says quietly. “You’re top of your class, and I’m well aware of your background. I won’t throw away a soldier like you.”
Her eyes are blue, Joan notices. A pale, greenish blue, like the light on the horizon just before the sun comes up. “Yes, ma’am,” she says. This is probably the part where she’s informed to keep her mouth shut and obey and be happy if she doesn’t get put down like a wounded animal when her usefulness outruns its course.
Major Sholto rhythmically taps her fingers on Joan’s file. “I know what you are, Watson, and so do you. No need to spell it out, yes?”
“No, ma’am,” Joan agrees. They probably won’t let her stay in the RAMC, though. Special ops, perhaps? Somewhere where they can point her at a target and let her loose, and nobody’ll ask questions when she’s killed in the line of duty. But she went into it with her eyes open, didn’t she? No point dwelling on it now. She lifts her chin and waits for it.
“There’s a procedure in place for cases like yours, if you want to call it that.” Major narrows her eyes at Joan. “I’m supposed to file you as expelled for some piss-poor reason and then threaten you with the identification number you should have and don’t, until you’re thoroughly convinced that your life is ruined and ready to beg me for mercy.” She tilts her head. “Then I’m to hand you over to MI6 to be used as a blunt instrument and earn a shite mercenary’s living until a year or so later when you die in the line of duty and we can delete every record of you ever fighting for Queen and country.”
Joan straightens her back just a bit more. “Do your worst. Ma’am.”
“As it happens, Watson, nobody ever asked me if I agree with all that.” Major Sholto flips her file open and reaches for a pen. “I never cared much for those bastards from secret service, anyway. As far as I’m concerned, something went wrong with your latest blood test, that’s all. It will be repeated and found perfectly normal. Understood?”
That’s—unexpected. “Not really, ma’am,” Joan gets out through numb lips. “What are you—”
“Shut up, Watson,” Sholto says, not unkindly. She crosses out something with a clipped motion of her pen. “When you start your service, I’ll be your commanding officer, and until then, I’m your mentor. Everything concerning you goes through me. I expect exceptional things from you, so I’m taking a special interest. Do I make myself clear?”
Joan opens her mouth.
“Nod your head, Watson, there’s a good girl.” Major Sholto flips her file shut and thrusts it at her. “Go back to class and report at the infirmary for repeat blood work first thing tomorrow.”
Joan clutches at her file and stands up. Her limbs seem to be floating. “Yes, ma’am. Right away, ma’am.”
Sholto smiles at her then, a small tight burst of warmth that hits Joan right under her ribs. “RAMC will be glad to have you, Watson.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” Joan whispers, dazed.
“Dismissed.” Sholto waves a hand at her and swivels away in her chair.
Joan goes.
***
Joan comes back from her second tour in Afghanistan tanner and thinner and calmer than she’s ever been in her life, and Harry introduces her to his bloody boyfriend, of all things.
Clark is sweet. He works in a confectionery shop, and wears pressed shirts, and clearly adores Harry, so no problem there. No, the problem is in Harry wearing a brand new pair of brown contact lenses that Joan’s never seen him wear before in all his life, and he has a brand new habit of nervous smoking.
He’s also using almost as much depilation cream as she does. Joan finds it when she goes to the bathroom and wastes no time to look through the cupboards, including all the usual hiding places. She finds the industrial-sized tube of Veet hidden amongst the rolls of toilet paper, and a hefty bottle of barbiturates on top of the cupboard, where Clark, barely taller than Harry, certainly wouldn’t look unless given a reason.
“Are you planning on telling him?” she carefully asks Harry when Clark’s in the kitchen making tea, and Harry lights a cigarette with shaking fingers.
“You gone mental or something?” He laughs lightly, with a barely perceptible touch of hysteria. “He has no idea. I’m keeping it that way.”
“But you’re living with him,” Joan whispers sharply. “He’ll find out. He will.” Their father found out about their mum when Joan was seven. He didn’t even wait to get a divorce; he just left, and Joan and Harry spent the next fifteen years watching their mother slowly fall to pieces.
“This from you? After a lifetime of lessons in secrecy?” Harry takes a deep drag and exhales, eyes wild. They’d be glowing, too, Joan knows, if not for the lenses he’s wearing. “I can’t tell him,” he says, a barely perceptible whine in his voice. “He ... he loves me, Joan, he really does.”
Joan swallows and reaches for Harry’s twitching fingers. “Times are changing,” she says gently. “Look, you could even get married now—”
“Civil partnership.”
“My point being that Clark seems like a lovely person.” Joan squeezes his hand. “He’d understand.”
“No, he wouldn’t.” Harry twists his hand out of her grip. “Times may be changing, but we aren’t. We’re still fairytale monsters.”
“There we go,” Clark says with a beaming smile, walking out of the kitchen with a tea tray in his hands. “Joan, I hope you like chocolate cupcakes.”
“Darling, how about a glass of wine for me?” Harry returns his smile, and Clarks goes back to the kitchen with an indulgent chuckle.
“Anything you want, dear,” he sings from the kitchen, jokingly affecting a plummy accent, and Joan’s throat hurts.
***
Years later, when Afghanistan spits her out, Joan goes with a medal pinned on her chest, a small pension, a dark little bedsit, and a prearranged therapist.
A good deal, everybody would say. Certainly a great deal better from what she was supposed to get.
But her Major Sholto’s hidden away from the world with half of her body as if torn from the claws of hell, and Joan has a useless shoulder and a leg that should work but doesn’t, and really, Sholto can go fuck herself, because Joan wanted to either die in Kandahar or keep on serving, as long as she got to stay, but Sholto never did give a damn about what Joan wanted, did she. Fraternisation is against the rules, Watson, and No marks, Watson, as if Joan were completely daft, and finally, That’s an order, Watson, a fucking order, I’ll die before I see you disgraced, you mad cunt.
“It’s going to take you awhile to adjust to civilian life,” her therapist says carefully, and Joan wants to tear his throat out with her bare teeth. Woman or beast, she’d manage it.
Instead, she changes her skin in her little beige bedsit and spends the night stalking around it in circles, her claws leaving hair-thin scratches in the floor. She’d been used to this, back when she was young, but after the open night skies of Afghanistan, it just feels like a prison cell.
***
Sherlock Holmes looks more like a beast than Joan ever will, but she smells like—fuck. Worn wool and London fog, warm silk and violin strings and the heated sweetness of her sweat. Wholly, unmistakably human, and despite that nobody since Harry and mom smelled so heartbreakingly right to her. Barely a day after they’ve met, Joan has her scent in her nostrils, twisted together with 221b’s comforting aroma of well-loved furniture and stray chemical fumes, and she can’t get enough of it.
Sherlock Holmes smells like mine. (Home, insists Joan, and swallows a growl that rises deep in her chest, demanding mine, mine, mine, more than it ever did for Harry or her unit or even Jemima.)
Sherlock Holmes is leaning against the warm-green wall right next to Joan, and she’s grinning wide and true, flushed and gasping for breath, and she’s just cured Joan’s bloody leg, and Joan grins right back before she can even think about it, all the dark clawed parts of herself surging forward.
***
Barely a day after they’ve met, and Joan forgets about self-loathing for the first time since the battlefield, and tracks the cab by Sherlock’s scent. It’s diluted and dispersed through the car’s ventilation system, overlaid with the cabbie’s stench of illness, nerves, and creeping anticipation, but the crystalline note of Sherlock’s adrenaline is impossible to miss.
“You found me,” Sherlock says two hours and a bullet later, and Joan can’t help but hear the unspoken well done, Watson in it.
She has her answer ready for the question it really is, though. “Tracked the pink lady’s phone,” she says. “Wasn’t a difficult leap.”
Sherlock’s white fingers absentmindedly destroy a fortune cookie, while her luminous eyes won’t leave Joan’s. “No, it wasn’t,” she says quietly.
“No,” Joan agrees pointlessly. Warily. They don’t seem to be talking about the same thing anymore, and Sherlock’s looking at her like she looked at Jennifer Wilson’s corpse. But Joan’s already shot a murderer for her tonight, and what else could Sherlock possibly want to know about her? What else could she know there was to know?
But no deductions come. Sherlock abruptly looks away and brushes the crumbs from her fingers. “Come back to the flat for some tea. I mean, would you like to?” She glances back up with a small smile. “I won’t be going to sleep for awhile yet, I’m afraid.” She taps her temple with one long finger. “Housekeeping to do.”
“Yes,” Joan says. Of course she does. Sherlock may have said married to my work earlier tonight, but now she’s looking at Joan with starry light in her eyes and she’s a battlefield made flesh and she smells so good, and of course Joan says yes, what else could she possibly say?
They don’t pay - another grateful owner that won’t let them leave until she’s embraced them both - and walk back through the night-time city. Sherlock talks about some kind of mnemonic technique that she uses, something about a mind palace or some such, and about the traps of analysing fingerprints left on soft surfaces. Joan listens and knows she should be bored. She isn’t.
The foyer of 221 is silent, all lights turned off. No Mr Hudson, then. Joan follows Sherlock’s polished brogues upstairs, into the warm dusk of her flat.
“I’ll get the lights,” Sherlock says, somewhat unnecessarily. “The floor is a bit … occupied, shall we say. No need for you to trip everywhere.”
So Joan stands still just inside the doorway in what must be almost-darkness for Sherlock, and watches her dart around the room, turning the mismatched lamps on one by one.
Sherlock stops in the middle of the den for a moment then, fingers gripping the lapels of her coat. Her hair had started the evening in a rather neat bun, but little curls have been steadily twisting free and at some point, Sherlock’d yanked the pins out. Joan watches her mouth, even softer now in the lamplight, and the shiny dark curls pressed against her pale throat and cheeks like blackbird’s wings - she’d nudge them aside with her nose and press her lips right there, under Sherlock’s jaw.
She shouldn’t. She knows she shouldn’t; Sherlock is the most perceptive person Joan’s ever met, they’re supposed to become flatmates, and adding sex to that would be the most fantastically stupid thing Joan’s ever done in her life. She licks her lips and sways forward.
Sherlock gives her a slightly embarrassed smile. “Tea!” she says and darts into the kitchen, dumping her coat on the sofa along the way.
Joan hesitates for a moment. Then she discards her own coat and follows her.
The kettle’s already on and Sherlock’s frantically shoving lab ware aside on the kitchen table. She manages to clear a small slice of space and gestures Joan to sit with a proud smile.
Tea seems to mean simply tea. Joan viciously bites down on her unreasonable disappointment and sits. She peers at the stack of slides next to a microscope and lifts her eyebrows at Sherlock.
“Experiment,” Sherlock mutters. “I can clean up, obviously. A bit.”
“Might be wise.” Despite herself, Joan feels the corners of her mouth lift in amusement. “What’re you working on?”
Sherlock waves her off and turns to the kettle. “Nothing interesting to someone who isn’t a chemist, I’m told,” she says.
“Why don’t you try me?” Joan suggests dryly. “I do have a medical degree.”
Sherlock’s quiet for several long moments. “I’m testing a potential reagent for haemoglobin,” she begins, “but I’m having trouble determining the exact solution …” and she launches into a complex explanation that Joan indeed strains to follow, not having a reason to visit a lab since her internship at Bart’s.
Sherlock talks and talks and Joan jumps in a few times to ask for a clarification or additional explanation, and it makes Sherlock beam at her. She explains it all, glancing over her shoulder at Joan, so delighted with having an audience again. It baffles Joan, really, how lonely Sherlock seems to be.
Hot water is poured into two mugs, teabags added. Sherlock brings them both to the table, along with a chipped blue sugar bowl and a slightly embarrassed mutter of I seem to be out of milk that Joan waves away with a smile.
“You take your tea with milk,” Sherlock insists.
“I won’t even ask how you know that.” Joan grins at her and tries not to be too obvious in her admiration. “It’s fine, really.”
Sherlock ducks her head and adds two heaping spoonfuls of sugar to her mug. “I hate to state the obvious, but we’re alone now,” she says, eyes on the swirling tea. “I’ve deduced something during our first meeting, something that I could’ve mentioned multiple times to multiple people if I wanted to, but I can assure you I didn’t. Similarly, I’m quite certain my nuisance of a sister deduced it as well, and if it were in her interest to remove you, you wouldn’t be sitting at this table right now. As you can see, your private matters will remain private with me.”
Joan’s blood runs cold.
Sherlock looks at her, sharp and so very bright. “Can I see the wolf?”
Joan gapes at her. “That’s not what people usually say,” she grits out, and a distant part of her notes her repeating the words Sherlock’s said earlier in the evening.
The corners of Sherlock’s mouth lift in a hesitant smile. “What do people usually say?”
Not much, because nobody’s ever known apart from her family and Major Sholto; Joan’s made certain of that. “You should be blackmailing me right now,” she suggests, mouth bone-dry.
Sherlock gives her that little confused frown. “Why would I do that?”
“Because I’m unregistered, Sherlock, my God, do you even realise what that means?” she whispers harshly. “If your sister knows—”
Unbelievably, Sherlock scoffs dismissively. “Mycroft’s far too lazy to bother, don’t be an idiot.”
Joan could strangle her. “The only one being an idiot right now is you, Sherlock,” she bites out. “You have no idea, no bloody idea, what’s it like to live with this.”
Sherlock contemplates her for a moment, infuriatingly calm. “Does that mean I get to see the wolf?”
“Of course not!”
“It is a bit early in our acquaintance,” Sherlock muses. “Never mind then, I understand completely. I’m sure you’ll feel differently after a while.”
“You still want me to be your flatmate,” Joan says faintly.
Sherlock leans over the table and shows her teeth. “You’re interesting.”
***
Joan swears to herself she’ll give Sherlock as little information about her nature as possible - it’s dangerous, it’s so dangerous, but she trusts Sherlock, doesn’t she, too much and too quickly, for reasons she doesn’t care to examine, which doesn’t make it any better, really - and promptly breaks it a scant few days after she’s moved in.
She’s making tea when Sherlock comes out of her room in the morning, soft dark curls all over her yawning face. The thick, familiar scent of discarded blood and moist flesh is immediate and obvious, walking several paces ahead of Sherlock herself.
“Morning,” Joan says and pours hot water over tea bags.
Sherlock grumbles. “Just tea for me, thanks.”
Joan rolls her eyes, plonks Sherlock’s tea down in front of her, and pops to the bathroom for a bottle of paracetamol. When she gets back, Sherlock’s head’s resting on the tabletop, and she deposits the pills next the the tangle of hair.
She goes back to making toast for herself and doesn’t really think about what she’s just done until Sherlock inhales sharply behind her.
“Did you just smell that I'm menstruating?” she demands, and Joan silently slaps herself.
“I’m sorry,” she says stiffly, and doesn’t turn around. “Didn’t think about it. Won’t happen again.”
“Don’t be an idiot, this is fascinating,” Sherlock says, sounding a lot more awake than she did mere moments ago. “How soon did you detect it?”
Joan swallows. “As soon as you opened your bedroom door,” she admits. “Periods have a pretty distinctive scent, as far as types of bleeding go.”
“And you’d be familiar with it as well, obviously,” Sherlock mutters.
Joan can’t help but snort. “Obviously,” she agrees dryly and turns around. “Look, Sherlock, I get that I was invasive, I just didn’t—think.” Didn’t think to hide, and that should be alarming, even if she knows Sherlock knows. It shouldn’t be so easy to let her guard down. Dangerous, dangerous, she’s so dangerous, but isn’t that just the problem? The Army had given her a taste for danger, and somehow, she still wants to run towards it instead of away from it.
Sherlock frowns slightly. “Why would I think you were being invasive?”
“No surprise there.” Joan grins at her and spreads jam over her toast.
“Exactly. Incidentally, thank you.” Sherlock gestures with the pill bottle and swallows two with her tea. “What else can you smell?” she demands.
Joan sits down with her plate. “I have to keep at least some of my secrets,” she tells Sherlock, but she’s telling it to herself, really. Her mad self, wanting to tell Sherlock everything, rolling around in the insatiable gleam of delighted fascination in those beautiful eyes.
Sherlock scoffs at her and steals a piece of toast off of her plate.
***
Joan tells herself the case of serial suicides was a fluke, nothing more. Sherlock is very much accustomed to working by herself, that much is obvious. She comes home and leaves at all probable hours (and more than a few improbable ones), offering a quick smile only, a don’t wait up Joan while she drains old tea from Joan’s abandoned mug, flips the collar of her coat back up and dashes out of the door.
Only a fluke, Joan repeats silently in her head, and tries to ignore the painful twitches that are slowly creeping back into the muscles of her thigh. She should be concentrating on settling in to the flat properly, and finally finding some kind of job.
A few days after she’s sniffed out Sherlock’s period, Joan has breakfast with Sherlock - or to put it a bit better, with a newspaper and the top of Sherlock’s bed-wrecked head. Sherlock disappears into her room afterwards, and Joan cleans up the remains of their breakfast with a sigh. She goes into their den and starts unpacking her box of books. If she concentrates, she can make the chore last at least until noon, and it’ll do with regards to putting off the whole job search thing as well.
Joan’s barely settled her Grey’s Anatomy and first two books in Aubrey-Maturin series on to the only empty shelf in the bookcase - she’ll have to tell Sherlock she wants some more shelf space for herself, if her flatmate deigns to spend more than ten minutes in the same room with her anytime soon - when a door bangs and Sherlock comes charging towards her through the kitchen, one arm through a coat-sleeve and her blue scarf trailing after her.
“Case!” she announces, beaming. “Two Italian chefs, their tongues cut off, sautéed in butter and white wine and arranged on the plate beside them.”
Joan nods. Don’t wait up, she mouths at the skull on the mantlepiece.
“Joan,” Sherlock says, unexpectedly hesitant, and it makes Joan look up. “Would you like—that is, you seemed to enjoy the first one, but.” She stops and swallows. “These violent deaths I just mentioned. Want to see them?”
It starts in her feet and works itself up through Joan’s body, until she's grinning at Sherlock so wide her face hurts. “You want me to come with you again.”
Sherlock’s eyes flash green. “Get your gun.”
***
As it turns out, not minding that her flatmate is a fucking fairytale monster is the least remarkable thing about Sherlock Holmes, and Joan isn’t sure if that’s at all a good thing.
She never smells of fear, which’d be unnerving enough without the fake grins she uses to freak people out. (It doesn’t take Joan long to notice that Sherlock never directs them at her, though, and she’s yet to get over how stupidly honoured that makes her feel.) The Met hates her guts (with the notable exception of Lestrade), for all they rely on her steady brilliance; there’s a terrorised pathologist in the Bart’s morgue that asks Sherlock out, gets ignored every time, and still brings her coffee whenever she expects it. There are body parts in the fridge.
Body parts. In the fridge.
Joan loses it a bit at that, but all Sherlock does is lift her eyebrows in annoyance.
“Well, where am I supposed to put them? Obviously you recognise the need for refrigeration of decomposing human tissue, Joan.”
Joan breathes, clenches and unclenches her fists. “Obviously I do. Keeping them right next to food, though, Sherlock? Not. Bloody. On.”
“Do forgive me, I didn’t mean to tempt you,” Sherlock says blithely, turning towards the window and reaching for her violin.
Joan splutters. "Tempt me?"
“I can hardly be blamed for not being aware of the particulars of your diet.” Sherlock turns a peg and plucks a string. “There’s no accounting for taste, is it? Rest assured, I’m uniquely equipped to provide for you.”
For a few moments, Joan can only open and close her mouth like a fish. “For fuck’s sake, Sherlock, I don’t eat people! What the hell d’you think I am, the big bad wolf?”
Sherlock turns her head and shows half of a smirk. “Not really, no.”
“What—Sherlock, this is not funny!” But there’s a laugh already shivering behind her ribs even when she’s still fuming.
“Course it is.” Sherlock turns to her with her whole body, violin held under her chin. She grins at Joan from under her fringe.
Joan can’t remember the last time someone’s had the audacity to joke about her nature. There never was anybody who’d want to laugh about it. With mom and Harry, it’s always too personal, too immediate. Jemima preferred to ignore it politely until it was momentarily useful to her. But Sherlock is … something else. Joan giggles, helplessly, as Sherlock’s amused eyes chuckle along with her and her fingers pluck at strings.
“I wouldn’t mind, you know,” Sherlock says when Joan’s stopped laughing. “If you did eat people.”
“You mad cunt,” Joan says, breathless. She’s thought it countless times in the last few weeks, but said out loud it’s unexpectedly fond.
Sherlock winks at her and turns back to the window.
She starts playing something fast and thrilling - Paganini, Joan’s reasonably certain, since she hears it at three in the morning often enough - and Joan stares at her narrow back for a long minute, thinking.
She’s starting to see why Mr Hudson dotes on Sherlock like she’s his own daughter; why the restaurant owners all over London feed her (and by extension Joan) for free every time she comes by; why the homeless folks always have a smile for her.