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It takes him all of twenty-five seconds to find the cause of death. He turns to Bell, already thinking about his next pitstop - if he hurries, he might make it to that exhibit on Etruscan tombs in time.
"It's Ricin." The gloves slap against his skin when he takes them off. "As I'm sure even you could've found out. Next time don't get my hopes up for nothing."
Bell scowls. Gregson isn't here this morning, which is for the better; he's been annoying lately, what with his constant nagging about addiction and rehab and whatnot.
"Don't you want to find the killer?" Bell asks.
Sherlock makes a face. "Already did - it's the wife." The thought of explaining tires him, so he doesn't. "I'm going now."
And he is, making his way across the lawn - well-kept, it's a rich neighborhood, serious people, bankers and the like -, when a scream reaches him. His head snaps up. He hasn't taken anything since the night before, so there's little chance it's an auditory hallucination, unless he severely miscalculated the quality of what he bought. His senses are a dull blade, but when he picks at the bottom of his pockets there's nothing, only lint. He must've finished what he had before. Another scream. Sherlock looks back, but if Bell is hearing, he's not doing anything about it. Dead people in trouble take precedence over live ones - it always ends this way when you work with the police. Sherlock can see the appeal. Cadavers don't scream, for one.
When he looks back down at the lawn he notices a discarded pink slipper, close to one of the fences. He hops over it to find a large white house, the pure artificial blue of the pool reflecting against the French windows. The third scream convinces him to come closer. They're coming from the far side of the pool, where a red-faced hunk is holding what looks like an angel made out of glass over a crying woman. She's blonde, missing one slipper. When she sees him her eyes widen, but she doesn't say anything. Smart.
Sherlock sneaks behind the man. It doesn't take much to disarm him, the stereotype of all brawn and no brains; after Sherlock presses his elbow against his windpipe he falls to his knees, and then Bell and his men are storming in to take him away. For once, their timing is perfect. The angel has fallen on the hard tiles and broke, big inelegant shards scattered around the woman's prostrated frame.
Sherlock looks back at her and feels a stab of pity. When she raises her hands to push her hair out of her face, he sees, without really meaning to, her protruding Adam's apple. She wipes her tears messily. When she sees him still standing there, she flinches.
"You can go, I'm fine. I don't need saving," she says, on her knees by the side of the pool, her white bathrobe pulled tight around her shoulders, trying to collect the shards of broken glass.
Sherlock blinks.
"I agree," he says eventually. "You need clothes and a shower. May I offer you a ride?"
Her relieved smile tells him that for once, he said the right thing. Satisfaction slowly makes its way through the daze. When he takes off his jacket and hands it to her, she takes it without a word.
"Yes," she says when she's put it on. She sweeps a thick bundle of hair behind her ear; smiles. "Please. Thank you."
He nods his head to match her, that's quite alright, and lets her walk in front of him.
*
At the brownstone he gives her a sweater, a pair of jeans and the privacy of his bedroom. Down in the kitchen he makes a pot of tea and tries to shake the need for a syringe. If there's one thing he hates about heroin, it's the way it keeps him chained, keeps him coming back for more. Unfortunately, though, the perks far outweigh the consequences. He'll get clean in time - later, when he's scrubbed his memory raw, when he's gotten sharper, better.
When she comes down Sherlock almost doesn't recognize her at first, maybe because of the way she twisted her hair into a ponytail or maybe because she doesn't have that look of abject fear on her face anymore. She's tall, and she fills the clothes, the sweater clinging snugly to her curves. Sherlock hands her a cup of tea, which she drinks with her lips pursed.
"Thank you for what you did," she says when both their cups are empty. "I appreciate it. If there's any way in which I can repay you..."
She holds her jaw out, defiant. She's been in this situation before, rescued from a violent man by a strange one. Sherlock draws her CV in his head, without really meaning to.
"It's fine. What's your name?"
"Martha." She pauses, waiting for something. When it doesn't come, she asks in turn, "And you?"
"Sherlock Holmes."
She takes a look around the room. It's chaotic, though Sherlock isn't really aware of it anymore, the mess integrated into his daily routine, his way of life. A few TVs are still on next to the couch, providing a decent background buzz. Sherlock isn't an expert in people, but you don't need to be to know that they're always looking for, rather than just looking; it only takes a glance to observe what Martha finds lacking. Pictures.
"I don't like keepsakes," Sherlock says abruptly. "I have an excellent memory."
Case in point: he still knows every detail of Irene's crime scene by heart, could describe it to a T. Martha looks up, surprised to be interrupted in her thoughts. Sherlock draws a card out of his jacket, Sherlock Holmes, Consulting Detective, and Martha - he'll always call her Ms Hudson in the future - turns it over in her hand, smiling thinly.
"You can stay as long as you like," Sherlock says, grabbing his wallet on the table. "I think there's food in the fridge, but I can't guarantee when it was originally bought. Take-out menus in the drawer. Take my clothes if you want, I have spares." He doesn't explain where he's going, or why. It's too late for the Etruscan exhibit, anyway; wherever he's going now he doesn't want to talk about. He slips out the door, not bothering to look back.
When he comes home a few days later, the inside of his forearms spoiled for blood, disheveled and hungry, he finds the brownstone pristine, the windows cleaned, the carpets vacuumed. An erring step towards the bookshelf informs him that his books have been organized by theme and author. His fridge is stocked, the clothes he lent Martha Hudson folded neatly on the table, with a note pinned to the sweater: Thank you. Sherlock smiles to himself and digs into the meatloaf.
*
He waits for her to call, intrigued. After a week, though, when nothing is forthcoming, his interest wanes and he goes back to his old hobbies, crime-fighting, learning Ancient Russian and spending nights in dark clubs just to get a hold of something to slip into his bloodstream, to wake himself up.
It's four on a September afternoon when his phone finally rings. Buried in the intricate workings of a case that involves an abduction, three horses, a length of rope and the acquisition of a land mower seventeen years ago, Sherlock doesn't pick up.
She quits school when her parents stop paying for it. It's as simple as that, really: she goes back home one Sunday, tells them that their Martin is really Martha, they kick her out of the family home and it's not like Princeton has a program for people like her, she can't pay back her loans, much less her rent, so she packs a bag and moves to Los Angeles. She doesn't stop studying: in the backseat of her car, after a long night spent dancing in one lurid club or another, she pages through Plato and Pythagoras, Plautus when she wants to have a bit of fun, painstakingly transcribing on two-for-one pads she gets at the nearest grocery store. Her money she keeps for the operation and the hormones, the pricey stuff.
She works her way up, because that's what you do, from those backrooms to parties where people find her alluring, exotic, and even though she's got salty words on her tongue she swallows them back, swallows her pride because those men have money and like everyone here she needs money to be who she wants to be. Still, she's smart, smarter than you ought to be at twenty: she doesn't do drugs and she doesn't take drinks she hasn't seen prepared under her eyes. That way she manages to avoid most of the trouble that tends to befall young girls in this town. There are scares, of course, ambushes in back-alleys, but on the whole she does alright.
To the first man who says, "Come home with me, I'll buy you a pretty dress," she says no, bats his hands away and runs. Second through tenth she accepts the money but doesn't go home with them, too scared or maybe, as they say here, too 'chicken'.
Then there's Vladimir.
It's the biggest cliché there is: the gentleman who sweeps in with his Jaguar and a wallet full to bursting, eyes full of sparks, who takes your hand and promises to save you. And Martha falls for it, she does - even worse, she falls in love with him, something she'll never quite learn to avoid despite her sometimes questionable taste in men.
He's good to her. His house is on the top of a hill and catches on fire when the sun sets; he's mysterious and broken and he tells her that the first time he saw her on stage (she doesn't know how to sing, or dance for that matter, but it's the only thing they'll let her do here) he felt something rumble in his chest, like his heart was starting up again. At first she finds it romantic; later she'll say that's because he was filled with petrol, he was a wasteland, his love was a disease.
But he pays, that's one thing in his favor. He pays for meals and he pays for surgery, bribes a few doctors for letters of recommendation, gets her top-notch breast implants most Hollywood housewives would die for. He calls her Martha like her name is made of honey, and she rolls with him in his bed and kisses him, head over heels in love and filled with joy and still twenty, then twenty-one, but young, young enough that when he calls her моему ребенку his eyes fill with tears.
She'll find out why, later. From the depths of his old mahogany desk she'll dredge up a photograph of his daughter - he talks about her sometimes, ridden with guilt: the child who died after I abandoned her mother back in the motherland - and realize with horror that he's crafted a model version of his past, that she looks like an older version of that fourteen-year-old, with her curly blond hair and piercing green eyes.
But even that can't convince her to leave. What would she do on her own? She's learned how to live like she's rich, how to wear her clothes, swagger into a pricey restaurant like she belongs, how to defy every slanted look and flash her diamonds around. Besides - besides, Vladimir loves her, he buys her designer dresses and first editions, a Greek translation of the Catiline Orations she was never able to get to occupy her orange fall evenings while he writes. He says one of the characters in his book is named after her (it's early enough that she still wonders: Martin, or Martha?).
The first time he lays a hand on her is the limit, as it turns out. When she slips out of bed to go to the toilet in the middle of the night, the bathroom mirror makes her bruise look like a monster eating her from the inside. From then on, it takes her less than an hour to pack her bags, take a thick bundle of cash from his secretary and walk to the bus station in the priciest heels she owns. By the time he wakes up and calls the cops on her, she's already halfway through the country, Cicero open in her lap.
*
In New York she finds yet more lovers, a more sedate pace of life - yes, she knows it's ironic - and an abundance of bookstores. Now that she doesn't need to translate to understand what she reads, her first trip after she climbs out of the bus is to the New York Public Library.
"Will you be staying a while?" one of the librarians asks her when she reaches the check-out counter, books piled under her chin. "We can provide you with a library card, if you wish."
Martha considers it. On one hand, she could sit here, leaf through all those volumes, maybe come back tomorrow, no harm no foul, no one would even know she was there. She would be as she's ever been since she became Martha Hudson, transient, invisible, slipping through the nets of modern life. On the other -
"Yes," she nods. She returns the librarian's smile. "Yes, I think I will."
By the time she walks out, her luggage exponentially heavier, she's smiling.
Ten years later, she's at that same librarian's - Emma's - wedding, smiling from the aisle at the radiant bride.
*
What she also finds in New York, besides consistent heartbreak (she remembers her mother with her wrinkled nose, ugly and spiteful: "It's all you people deserve"), is Sherlock Holmes. It's enough to say that he waltzes into her life, in a fashion she'll later learn is typical of him. He keeps Justin from sending her to the hospital, gives her his jacket; at his house he boils a cup of tea for her and then leaves, with the door open and a little absent smile sent her way. Martha takes the business card and cleans his house, 'for the trouble'. Her mother might have been a cunt, there are some things in her education she did right.
She puzzles at the job description for a while but only calls him three months later. It's a matter of pride, that's all: she wanted to wait until she was afloat again to pay him back, invite him to a nice restaurant since he didn't seem in need of a professional muse. He's not the type, anyway; she can usually tell those from miles, and he isn't it. (Then again, she can also usually tell addicts, and it takes her two more months of regular frequentation to notice the careful way he flexes his arms, like something's perpetually tickling the inside of his elbow. As far as men go, Sherlock Holmes is fairly opaque.)
The invitation is to a quiet, unostentatious Manhattan tearoom only the rich ever wander into, that breathes elegance from every inch of its soft velveteen drapes. Martha settles in an armchair with a book ("Ask for Ms Hudson," she told Sherlock on the phone. Coming out of a marriage with the only man she's ever made the mistake of marrying for love, she found for the first time in her life that she quite liked her maiden name). When Sherlock waltzes in - again - nearly an hour later, he doesn't apologize for his lateness, nor does he comment on the surroundings - in fact, he doesn't even seem to notice where they are. He jerks his chin at her book, his eyes black and intense.
"History of the Peloponnesian War. I studied it for a case, never got around to finishing it."
Martha smiles, beautiful and practiced. That, too, seems lost on her public. "What can I say, I'm a big fan of wars."
Devoid of humor, his eyes snap up to her face, so sharp she has to hold back from raising a hand to shield herself. "Yes," he says matter-of-factly. "Judging by the venue, your choice of book, shoes and perfume, you're trying to impress me. But you can read Ancient Greek, otherwise you wouldn't have taken the risk of choosing this book, which means you're clever, but you haven't finished college, self-taught, I'd wager, your index still has the trace of a ring, you've been married recently, and you don't seem to have a place of residence. So," he leans forwards, hands joined, "what can I do for you, Ms Hudson?"
It tips her off-balance, that speech, she won't say the contrary: she probably has the same expression on her face she's seen on dozens of others when he does that trick, telling you your life story after half a minute's acquaintance. But she rights herself quickly enough, slipping back into her mask of self-confidence. She hails the waiter, orders a pot of Darjeeling for the both of them - she's partial to tea and he's British, it's a win-win.
"You were wrong about the book," she says. He frowns, arches a demanding eyebrow. "That first sentence." She smiles, watching a cube of sugar darken at her fingertips. "I just like Thucydides."
It doesn't take much for them to become friends, after that.
(She keeps waiting for him to ask what her real name is, but he never does.)
Martha Hudson arrives at the crime scene at 2:30 am, exactly thirty-four minutes after having been summoned - which, for the record, is much too long in Sherlock's book - wearing crimson high heels and and a lime-green sheath dress. Bell gapes. Sherlock scowls. Martha smiles.
"Sorry," she says, not sounding sorry at all. "A lady always needs a little time to get ready."
Sherlock scowls harder, but it's not like he can retort that people are dead, because he's usually the first to say that the dead don't mind waiting. "Let's get to it, shall we?"
"Of course," Martha says graciously, taking off her satin gloves and putting on the ones Bell hands her. Sherlock has no time for the little dance the two of them like to have before they get to work; he interrupts, "The alleged suicide note is in Ancient Greek."
"Mm," says Martha. She throws Sherlock an amused glance. "You should really learn, you know, if it irritates you so much. Anyway - so you think he was murdered, and someone planted the letter on him, or... ? Was he a scholar?"
"Yes; and the letter's from the murderer, not from him. Of course Gregson's graphology experts are utterly useless, as predicted." He steers her towards the victim's study with a hand at the small of her back. "This way."
When they enter the room Anderson is leaning over the corpse who is face-first on the desk, a gilded letter-opener stuck through his thin, parched neck.
"Oh," Martha says, but she doesn't flinch. They've been to a few crime scenes since they met and Sherlock discovered she could be useful in his cases as well as in a purely social context, but usually she comes in after Gregson's team's disposed of the gore. She doesn't seem nearly as shocked as most people when they first see this kind of display; Sherlock makes a mental note to ask her about it.
"Well, it looks like your murderer, if it is him, was a big fan of Homer. But there is a meeting, place and time."
"The confrontational type," Sherlock says. "It figures. Can you give me a translation for the whole thing?"
"In a minute."
She sits down in one of the desk's plump leather chairs, folds her legs, a pad propped up on her knee. It only takes her a few minutes to finish her work, Sherlock pacing up and down in front of her. He almost rips the sheet from her hand as soon as she's done, but she doesn't take offense - she never does. Bell sidles up to her.
"How can you be friends with that wacko? It's beyond me, I swear."
"Well, detective, let's just say that it takes one to know one. Now, do you know where I might find a bathroom? I need to freshen up."
"If you're not creeped out about using a dead man's toilet, sure." He points to the end of the corridor.
By the time she comes out most of the officers have packed off, though Serlock's still here, kneeling on the carpet. Martha taps his shoulder lightly. "Is everything alright?"
"Yes." He turns around, peers into her face, long enough to make anyone uncomfortable. But she has a life of being stared at behind her. "Well done on the meeting."
"Encryption is something of a hobby of mine," Martha says. She reaches a hand to help him up. "How about you buy me breakfast to thank me? I'm absolutely famished."
*
She goes back to his house a few weeks later, for another case. He's been up all night - the house is an even bigger mess than when they first met, the floor strewn with casefiles, open takeout containers and the pins he uses to decorate his wall in what looks like a shrine to murder. It's not very fashionable, but it gets the job done. The only problem, of course, is that it's been three nights since he hasn't slept and even though he couldn't waste the time to go out, he did have a baggie of heroin left in one of his socks.
She rings the bell, but he won't go open, afraid of the harsh sunlight. If it's her, she'll let herself in; if it's someone else, he doesn't care.
"Hello," he hears behind him. When he turns around she's standing in the kitchen, looking at him. She's wearing suede high-heeled boots, he remarks absently as he retraces her entire itinerary. She's moved; she didn't take her usual train. Sometimes he wishes there were another drug, so those thoughts could stop parasitizing him. Heroin just makes everything wheel faster and, sadly, doesn't discriminate.
"You're here," he snaps. "Sit down, let's get to work. If we don't work this out by seven pm he'll probably kill her."
But Martha only presses a hand to his forehead. Even though he jerks back, she makes a concerned face. "You're burning up. Are you on something?"
"A matter of no importance," he says, thin-lipped. "If you're not going to participate, I'd ask you to leave. Your presence will probably hinder my thought process."
"Sherlock."
He won't apologize, he never does; but he also knows that she doesn't like being treated like an accessory. Why he cares is another story. He closes his eyes, tries to tie his thoughts together, form a coherent sentence, explain the situation - but ideas jump at him from all sides, some good, some dubious, some utterly absurd. When he opens his eyes back up, his vision is swimming. Martha sighs.
"Have you eaten anything lately? Do you want me to make you a sandwich?"
He says no, and she does anyway; after that they work on the case for a few hours, him sitting on the ground, shirtless - she might be right about that fever - and her at the table, her knees crossed. They close the case at six thirty and immediately report the results to the NYPD. Though the girl is saved, Gregson reports over the phone that eleven child skeletons were found buried in the murderer's backyard.
"You should get some sleep," Martha says when he hangs up, his face drained of all color. She's made dinner, tidied up a little. She's good with her hands; Sherlock likes that. He likes people who aren't idle. "I thought you'd stopped," she says, softer.
He did; he stopped for a while, when the drugs started to make him miss things instead of catch them, when searching for suppliers took up too much of his time and didn't guarantee a good product. But then Irene came back, Moriarty came back, and he'd rather fail on all of his cases than hear her laugh again, dream of her. He nods. It'll do for an answer.
She stands in front of the wall, his wall: nothing from this case, that's still over the floor, but his few meagre clues when it comes to her murder. At the centre of the web the one picture of her he has, a candid, Irene in three-quarters, holding onto her paintbrush. The autopsy picture is somewhere, too, but he never looks at it. It's not her.
"And I thought you didn't like keepsakes," Martha says, oblivious.
She raises her hand to touch the picture; her fingers hover, poised, and Sherlock thinks he might leap and tear it from her, an outburst of emotion he'll probably regret later, and blame on the drugs. But she must catch something on his face; her hand retreats slowly, falls to her side.
"Well," she says. He watches her rehearse a few sentences in her head, words of wisdom about love, condolences. In the end she seems to think better of it. "You should go to sleep," she repeats; and this time, he does.
She's still here in the morning when he wakes up. She hands him a cup of coffee and the part of the newspaper she isn't reading. He waits for the irritation that usually comes with the protracted frequentation of people - when it doesn't show, he relents, nursing his slight nausea. He spots vitamins on the table, probably to help with his cravings, and though he knows he won't stop, he takes them anyway. He can have one day, can't he? He sits on a stool; she looks up, shoots him a distracted smile.
She stays the week-end, a soft and knowing presence while he goes about his day, maybe with a little more consideration than he usually has. He wouldn't know how to explain his feelings towards her: respect and a grudging friendship, maybe, a feeling of kinship between things misfit and slightly broken. On Monday morning she leaves with a wrinkle barring her forehead, dispensing a few instructions he won't follow; as he retreats back into the brownstone, he realizes with surprise that her absence has a shape, a color and a lingering smell, lavender and jasmine.
*
She wouldn't say, exactly, that the city has been kind to her; but it's been kinder than other things and other places, other people. It's in New York that she got most of her operations, excluding the vaginoplasty, which was done back in Los Angeles; in New York that she found her ground, how to love people, how to make people love her; in New York that she got interested in lyrical singing, started taking classes. Her teacher says she's got a beautiful voice, a deep and soulful alto.
Why do you do what you do? people still ask her. It's a beautiful new world, you could be the first transgender something, a lawyer, a professor, a singer, an astronaut, who knows. Layla says she ought to try her hand at massage therapy, she's always been good at that. But the truth is - what she says, when people listen -, the truth is that she's not doing what she's doing because she can't do anything else, but because she wants to. She says, People need love, don't they? They need inspiration, they need creativity, they need companionship. And I can give that. I have enough love in me to feed a whole army.
So yes, if you're asking, she's happy. She's working for it, every day, but ten or fifteen years ago she thought she'd never get to that point, she thought people like her didn't and that was it. Now she's thirty-three and a beautiful, successful woman, with friends, money, occasional heartbreaks. She's found that getting her heart broken regularly gives it elasticity, allows it to bounce back into shape every time it's stepped on or shattered. You could say that she's found a few answers.
It's too late in the night and too early in the morning for her to know what time it is when the phone rings this time. Lionel stirs besides her, but she kisses his shoulder, tells him to go back to sleep; then she unplugs the telephone. People need their beauty sleep. When she listens to the voicemail the next morning, Sherlock's voice, weary and thin: "I'm going to be in rehab for a few months, my father insisted on it, and you know how our relationship is reliant on trust and blackmail." His dry, humorless laugh. Then, slightly imperious: "Bring me oranges, will you?"
"Took you long enough," he says, squinting against the cold spring sun.
She pays him no attention; instead she pulls up a lawn chair and sits next to him, large sunglasses eating off half her face. Her smile disappears under the edges.
"I like what you've done with the place," she jokes.
The room inside was bare, save for an unmade bed and a desk strewn with documents. The garden, because the facility is so far from the city and so expensive - his father is paying for it, after all: what kind of resentful son would he be if he didn't take full advantage of that? -, is luscious and green, with extravagant bushes showing off their color a few paces from them.
It takes one look for Martha to see how bored he is. Even if she hadn't, he starts ranting about it as soon as she relaxes into her chair: seems like he can't get anything done here, can't get his mind to function properly, and of course there's nothing to do except read. She takes the opportunity to hand him a few books she picked up in Elijah's library - he won't miss them, he barely ever reads. Sherlock takes the bag, still talking. He takes a look inside and smiles slightly, doesn't thank her.
"Are you listening to me?" he asks after a few more minutes of rambling complaints.
"I am. You were talking about bees?"
"There is an apiary down the street, fascinating - they have species I'd only heard about, of course it's quite another matter acquiring bees in New York, as you can imagine." She nods - not that he needs it. "I've been studying the behavior of the queen. I might write a monograph if I have to stay here longer; otherwise I'll die of abject boredom."
He makes a face, and she laughs. "What about the drugs?"
He gives her a disdainful hand motion. "Oh, that. Done and over with." He wrinkles his nose. "It's impossible to procure anything that's of remotely good quality here, anyway."
She thinks about asking him if he's done with it for good, but he's Sherlock Holmes: if he wants to lie about it, he will. She bends over the arm of the chair to rummage into her bag again.
"Did you bring me something? I've heard interesting things about that new study on blood splatter, actually, I was considering asking you if you would -" He stops short when the orange rolls into his lap.
She chuckles at his confusion. "Promised, didn't I?"
He picks the orange up, turns to her, still squinting. With a little shrug, he starts peeling the fruit, the peel coming off in long, regular odorant stripes.
"Oh, and sunglasses," he says a while later, interrupting their conversation on the ideas of Machiavel and the papal state. "Seems I didn't pack accordingly for the weather."
"I'll write that down," Martha says, and she does.
*
Something Martha likes about her life, besides her truly state-of-the-art wardrobe and the New York Public Library, is traveling. It's one of the perks of being in the trade of love, really: it makes men giddy and prone to spend their money, and who is Martha to tell them to stop? She's the first to say that the millennium's distinction between money and happiness is the stupidest thing that ever was. It goes without saying, then, that when Davis presents her with his idea of spending a month in Florence - he has a meeting there for his company, he says, and after that he can clear his schedule -, she melts into his arms, delighted.
In-between languorous strolls down piazzas and romantic boat rides, she finds the time to send Sherlock a postcard he probably doesn't read. Unfortunately for her, love is a fickle thing, and though she returns to New York with a tan she also trails behind her a brand new broken heart, which is not in the least warmed by the enormous snowstorm that falls on the city as soon as she's disposed of her bags and all the jewelry Davis gave her.
Her first meeting with Joan Watson is a little awkward, but if Martha believes in something, it's that she's good at thawing the ice. After all, she's been hearing about 'my associate, Watson', spoken with a faint tinge of red on Sherlock's neck, for months now. The story is an intriguing one: ex-doctor turned 'sober companion', and the first person Martha has ever heard of capable to withstanding Sherlock on a daily basis. He's been hoarding her, refusing that Martha meet her for some reason only he can make sense of; and she hasn't insisted, too busy with her and Travis's honeymoon period to really care.
As it turns out, Joan Watson isn't the mythological monster she had been imagining, which is only slightly disappointing -- instead of a chimera Martha finds in her a tiny but formidable woman. She's got what Martha admires most in people, which is a good head on their shoulders - an accessory which Sherlock definitely lacks - and contrary to what Martha expected, she stands her ground against him, insisting that he treat her as an equal. Martha had been content to settle on the man's terms, conform to his idea of human contact - it's what most of her job is about, after all -, but she doesn't have to live with him every day. Joan Watson is doing the best of the situation anyone ever could - and stranger still, she seems to be enjoying it.
It doesn't take long for her to forgive Martha for showing up at the brownstone unannounced, and they fall into an easy relationship, separate from the one they both have with Sherlock. Over coffee - well, tea for Martha, but Joan drinks coffee like a real New-Yorker -, she's softer, less stern. When Martha asks her jokingly how she tamed Sherlock, she embarks onto a long explanation; it is both easy and heartwarming to see how close they have grown, how well-oiled their dynamic is.
"So," Martha asks, "you're going to stay, then?"
A cool breeze, a rare gift this late into the summer, washes over their bench. Joan gives a loose shrug, taking a sip of her coffee. "You're not the first person to ask me that. But I don't know why I shouldn't. I mean, sure, Sherlock's extreme and eccentric, but what he does is honorable and he thinks I could be good at it."
"Did he tell you that?"
Joan gives her a slight smile. "Not in so many words, but yes. And you know he's not the type to lie. So... why not? I mean, it's an adventure, but..." She lets her sentence trail off.
They spend the rest of the afternoon together, sometimes interrupted by imperious texts from Sherlock, trying to steer their conversation even though he's not part of it, which they laugh at together. Martha talks about her new lover, the possibility of a job at the library, maybe, and a letter she received from her mother, after all these years; Joan talks about Sherlock and Clyde, her own parents, who don't know what to think of her new life choices, her past as a surgeon, that case.
"You know," Martha says, "I think that we put too much importance on the past. Look at Sherlock," Joan grimaces, "I don't think he loved Irene half as much in London as he did when she came back, and that's what broke his heart. And look at me: bad things happened to me back in Los Angeles, and even here, but you can't let the past be defined by one moment, one memory. I have a friend who once said, you only remember bad things about the people you love. Because there is too much of the rest, you know? Too much happiness, too many moments that are just the everyday, things you don't remember... One bad memory is like a pinprick. That's all; no more, no less."
Joan gives her an oblique smile from her corner of the bench, and Martha's cheeks heat up. "Sorry, I get passionate."
"You may be right," Joan says.
She picks up her bag silently. As she's preparing to leave, her head snaps up. "Oh, by the way. Sherlock gave me something for you."
"Did he really? How sweet."
Joan frowns, as though saying, I know. It's strange, right? She still has a lot to learn about him, and he her: good and bad things alike, that make up the stuff of shared life; but Martha has a feeling they'll do well with it, even though they might not get it on the first try. They won't let go. Joan hands her a book - History of the Peloponnesian War. Martha smiles as she takes it from her hands.
"What is it?" Joan asks.
"A book I was reading when we met. He's been giving me every new edition he finds since then."
"How many do you have?"
"Twenty-three. Most of them are in Ancient Greek, but the translations vary." She smiles to herself, remembering. "He got me one in Finnish once."
"Do you even speak Finnish?"
"Oh, yes. I used to date a Finnish heir, back in... I don't remember when. Very tall. Look." She opens the book: as predicted, on the first page is scrawled in Sherlock's handwriting, crammed into a blank space: From: Sherlock Holmes, C.D.
"Oh," Joan says softly, and Martha doesn't need to look up to see the look in her eyes. She closes the book, slides it into her handbag; tilts her hat just so.
"I'll see you, Miss Watson," she says with a bow of the head.
Joan makes a little wave with her hand. She shakes her head, then turns back and starts walking.
*
It's something of a tradition now, even though Sherlock will deny it to his grave: every other Sunday she comes by the brownstone and gives it a thorough sweeping, after which her hosts thank her with lunch, sometimes dinner. Sherlock, when put - and kept - to the task, is actually a very good cook - of course, that's when he's not distracted by something or other, but Joan's proven a worthy quartermaster, and there are soon boeuf bourgignon, tian, duck breast with orange glaze - among others - served at the table. The conversation is always interesting, too, and Martha makes a habit of teasing Sherlock and Joan about their living quarters - doors facing each other, huh? Sherlock swats the insinuations away, but it's fun anyway.
One Sunday, just before she leaves to meet her mother for tea for the first time in eighteen years, she steals the newest monograph on Sherlock's freshly-tidied desk, to occupy herself in the tube. Its title reads: Introducing the Euglassia Watsonia. Martha laughs; as she walks down the street she feels light, free and generous, as though life really had been kind to her.