Work Text:
There was always something on, someone to do for. Martha Hudson met all gentle requests, coy hints and subtle admiring glances for her creations with joy. She gleefully put her heart into each stitch, and her completed works were enjoyed by men, women, children, and babies. Oh, she had her favourites, alright. The wee blankets for infants charmed her, and the lacy women's scarves appealed to her sense of aesthetics. She wore her own shawls with pride, judging them far superior to mass-produced store garments. But above all, Martha most enjoyed knitting surprises. She worked those up for some unsuspecting recipient, stitched the item up with love and revelled in the moment when she could share her gift. It was also to her credit that she was a swift knitter, and among all her friends she was renowned for having the virtue of never leaving a single project unfinished. But, given the sad event nearly two years ago, that was no longer quite true.
Spring 2011
Her boys, as she mentally referred to them, had come out on top. On top of their game, on the top page of the news, on top of the world. If she ever felt too warm, she only needed to stand near the stairway for all the coming and going that John and Sherlock did; those last few weeks, a brisk spring draft followed them in and out. Sherlock’s coat swept out behind him in the breeze, and it was that constant flow of air - and the increasingly stained, stretched, and threadbare appearance of a certain scarf - that led Martha to turn her attention to creating a celebratory garment for her tenant the Consulting Detective.
Sherlock, of course, saw through everyone and everything in minutes, but knitting was not his area, so Martha was confident that her gift would go undetected until the absolute last minute. His current scarf would last him through the few chilly days of summer, so she had all the time in the world to finish it up by the time the weather turned in early fall. That May, she selected a pure wool in a lovely worsted weight from her local shop. The fibre had a delicious sheen, and it was both utilitarian and luxurious. Sherlock warranted utilitarian for sure - though he treasured his designer clothing, he was the very devil on his trouser knees and hems, the heels of his socks, and the seams under the arms of jackets. Martha was definitely not his housekeeper but she had noticed in his dry-clean pile the prematurely worn bespoke garments with some frankly alarming stains from dear-knows-what from the streets and that kitchen.
Yes, Sherlock would need something rather durable. His doctor, on the other hand, could be trusted with more delicate items, so she thought fondly of some socks for John. He might even appreciate a bit of Fair Isle. But she would plan to make those up for him for his birthday, which wasn’t for another two months yet - first things first.
The store only had one skein of Sherlock’s perfect blue (not sapphire like that gem he and John had laughed over, but stormcloud navy) though they assured her more would be in stock by June. She got started at once, although by the time she was a quarter of the way through, that dreadful trial began, continued, and never really ended for her, John, or the Detective Inspector.
It smelled of him, and she couldn’t even say how that might have been possible, not when he had never worn it, hadn’t survived to even touch it. Fingers that couldn’t forget twisted, pushed and twirled and something looped around, half-completed, until the heart caught up and several stitches fell.
It didn’t matter. It didn’t matter when she crumpled it up, either, into a wrinkled wad, where it lay dotted by tearstains that shone like puddles of blood.
It felt as though she would forever be cleaning up Sherlock's little messes.
She'd become, if not resigned to, then at least fondly exasperated by cleaning up after Sherlock Holmes during the years he'd been her tenant; after his death, the monthly dusting and airing of rooms no one moved through any more were physically effortless and mentally excruciating. She'd accepted Mycroft's above-market rent payments "to provide Doctor Watson with a refuge, if necessary" with something that oscillated between gratitude and outrage.
And now, he was back. Back from the dead - except he'd never really been dead, he explained, just off on one of his little adventures - and drinking tea in her kitchen over a rather painful-looking split lip. For all that she was overjoyed to see him again, she hoped that it hurt like hell, and mentally kissed Doctor Watson's cheek for having given Sherlock the smallest taste of the agony he'd clearly gone through.
Well. That they’d all gone through. She hadn’t had to watch the man fall - it surely would have given her a heart attack, so perhaps that was a kindness, however small or unintentional - but she had had to outlive a man who was for all intents and purposes nearly a son to her. A favourite nephew, at least. Certainly never a tenant, for all her protestations to the contrary. Sherlock had been there to help her through when Matthew, the bastard-and-may-he-rest-in-peace, had gotten himself arrested overseas for that business with the imported Harrods fruitcakes with rather more heroin than was sold on level 2 in London, and she had failed him when he needed her to protect him. She had cried over for him so many times, imagining the poor dear all lonely and afraid and thinking that no one would stand up for him and avow that no, he wasn’t a fake or a fraud, no matter what the fishwraps might say.
And it had all been a lie. Call it a magic trick if you like, but a lie it was, plain and simple.
Useless and a bit wrinkled, one might say, but that’s what time does to everything, after all. Regardless, Martha couldn’t leave it alone. A year passed, several months, and finally, the conservationist in her mended the holes up, jabbing a needle point here or there to grab a wayward stitch. She straightened the work back up to a reasonable standard to sit on the needles once more. To sit, untouched but undiscarded. Enshrined.
She couldn’t continue on it anymore, anyway - the thread had run out.
November 2013
"I never expected John to behave so irrationally. And certainly not you, Mrs. Hudson. What possessed you to wield a frying pan at me?" He was idly toying with it, spinning the handle to and fro on the tabletop. The steady grating noise wore on her nerves, and all she could think about were the dreadful scratches he had left on her upstairs table. Careless, he was, of the damage he did to all of them.
Martha swabbed at her eyes and then crumpled the tissue into her fist, nails digging into her palm. "Sherlock. I’m glad to see you, dear, and I’m so glad you’re alive, but in many ways I wish you’d stayed dead." His frown of incomprehension simply made her angrier. "You left. You took yourself out of the world more completely than if you’d just disappeared. You made it seem as though you’d died, and all the explanations from now until Christmas won’t make up for that. You took everything we ever knew and you threw it away, so much more so than whatever the papers were saying. You betrayed us - you betrayed Dr. Watson - and you can’t just come back from that."
"I fail to understand the point. Grief is a sentiment that can be dispensed with, now that the object of that grief -" here he raised one supercilious eyebrow - "has returned."
"Object! Poor John told me he hated himself for calling you a machine, but now I see what he meant! You were never an object to either of us, you great lummox!"
She whirled to the newspaper bin behind her. "I kept everything about you. Every little newspaper clipping. And I kept the papers that called you a fake and a liar and a fraud, too. Because I couldn’t get rid of them!" She upended the bin onto the kitchen floor, papers trumpeting "SUICIDE OF FAKE GENIUS" and "BEHIND THE LIES" and "BACHELOR DOC IN COVERUP SCANDAL" and "TOP COP DROPPED" scattering everywhere, along with a crushed straw basket of neglected if not forgotten knitting. Sherlock didn’t move, even when a tiny ball of that starless midnight blue unravelled itself to rest with a barely-audible chif against his shoe. The needles were caught in the basket’s weave and she screamed and shook it until it, too, clattered to the floor, one needle bouncing off and under the range.
Martha's hands were trembling and she turned away from her former tenant, tamping down her rage. She heard a faint rustle and step behind her, along with a toe scuff along the floor.
"This was worked on for the span of two months, judging by the fading of the colour in the sunlight, which, let's be honest here, with your eyesight you knit almost exclusively in the daytime. But it’s got other fibres on it, and there’s been no further sunbleach, so it’s been stowed away from the light since you stopped working on it."
There was the gentle thud as one knee went to the floor and Martha heard him inhale deeply.
"It’s been stored with mothballs, common practice for a woman of your means to preserve treasures made with animal fibre. Foul but necessary, often more reliable than cedar or lavender. It’s just past half the length of a proper scarf, done all in pure wool. The texture is soft, with a shine found in the wool of sheep from Peru. The fibre would repel water at first, making it ideal for winter wear. But here, there’s been water spots already…"
Martha heard a clink as the half-done scarf was turned on its single needle against the floor. She couldn’t quite tell, but in that moment, she thought the tone of Sherlock’s deducing voice changed.
"...water stains close to point at which you stopped knitting it for a while. You dropped stitches, many stitches. Then you laid it aside, as it was, incomplete, for some time. The bent fibres around the...gaps...shows that it stayed that way for at least a year, untouched. But for some reason, you picked up and continued, even though your stitching was damaged, had holes in it. You knitted until there was no more of the colour you started with left. And now that it’s used up...how do you even go on… now that so much is different…now that the pattern has been broken?"
His normally-forceful voice had grown tight and drawn, trailing off completely on the question. Suddenly, Martha felt ropy arms wrap around her and a heavy head rested itself on her shawl-covered shoulder. Messy curls tickled her cheek, soft, just like a small child’s.
"I...am sorry, Mrs. Hudson."
The arms awkwardly clutched her, but then they tightened, squeezing, before Sherlock withdrew to sit at her table once more. With his head bent low, he said into his teacup,
"It looks very warm. Most comforting."
Almost against her will, she went to pat him on the shoulder. His cup was down to the dregs, and without a further word, he tugged at his jacket and rose again. To her considerable surprise he haphazardly gathered the newspapers she had scattered about the kitchen and thrust them messily into the bin. Then, he tenderly gathered up the incomplete scarf and gently laid it on the table beside his saucer, stroking it reverently with one finger for a very brief space of time.
With a deep sigh, he bent and pressed a kiss to Martha's forehead. In turn, she nodded silently at him and let him creep upstairs to gradually rebuild the wreckage he had left behind him.
In a matter of months the flat was filled with all manner of light and laughter again. Oh, there were the snickers of the men she had known, only now they were joined by the sweet, musical giggles of John's Mary - Mary, who had brought John back to life and who had then brought her boys back together. At least three times a week they all dined together at some odd hour or another, and Sherlock always managed to stir himself to contribute something, though he still ate little himself. They pulled Martha in when the hour was reasonable, and there was comfort and happiness and love.
It was one fine day in high spring when Martha returned to the flat with groceries, and Sherlock stepped out of a cab. He insisted on taking both bags of shopping from her - in the months since his return he had become deferential, even accommodating - and barrelled through the door to her kitchen. By the time she followed him in, he was already on his way out,
"Thanks, anyway, Mrs. Hudson - no time for tea! There's photos from this lovely bloated corpse they found in Regent's Park that I've simply got to hang for John - he's already on his way!"
There were so many things wrong with both the facts in that statement and Sherlock's exuberance over them, but Martha simply could not bear to admonish him.
"That's nice, dear. Perhaps I'll make those cakes you both like?"
Sherlock didn't respond, already bounding up the stairs; it was highly likely he was deeply enmeshed in calculating the varying rates of human decomposition. Martha smiled to herself and went to her kitchen. In spite of his haste and excitement, she thought, he had stopped to help her with the groceries. The last year had wrought so many changes, and, as it turned out, many of them had been very good for Sherlock. She reached into the first bag to grab the soup tins, and instead her fingers grazed a soft, pliant bundle.
The nail of her forefinger caught on it, and she realized she was touching yarn. She grasped around it and pulled it from the bag, then paused in surprise. It was a fat skein of navy worsted wool, about two hundred metres’ worth. It hadn't been wound yet, and the label clearly spelled out its brand.
Sherlock had found her enough blue to finish. It wasn't the correct dye lot - it had been years, after all, and no doubt the difference in colour would show up...but Martha knew he would wear it anyway.
She left the groceries where they were and went to retrieve her nostepinne, already turning in her memory to where she had left off in the pattern - row two of the garter section, if she recalled correctly. There were those irregularities she had left when she picked up her dropped stitches, but she realized that Sherlock would not thank her for ripping back to re-knit the errors.
From now on, they would only be going forward.
