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Whitechapel
"You certainly would have been burned at the stake, Holmes," Watson chuckled, taking a deep draught of his beer, "Had you lived a few centuries ago. If I hadn't known the Chinese acrobat was you I would never have believed it. And certainly you fooled the crowd and Lestrade. It was almost magical."
Holmes shrugged, taking a sip of his own porter. The faintest hints of greasepaint still could be seen below his ears and at his normally immaculate hairline, but it was only the Ten Bells, in Whitechapel. As long as they weren't actually slitting the throat of a prostitute as they drank nobody would pay them the least mind.
"The art of disguise is one I've often thought of writing a monograph on, but it's hardly magical. Anyone who's willing to apply themselves to the theory and practice could manage it."
"Nonsense," the older man laughed, "It takes a true gift. The stage lost a fine actor when you turned your energies to fighting criminals."
Sherlock scowled, and groused, "When you're writing this up, perhaps don't attribute me as some sort of idiot savant. It is a learned, and intensively practiced skill, as are all of my methods."
Watson rolled his eyes.
"I was trying to be nice to you, you great twit," he said, "And surely you have to acknowledge that there's some sort of innate and unusual ability which you possess that makes it possible."
"By no means," Sherlock shrugged, "In fact I'd wager you that I could teach anybody of reasonable intelligence to do it."
"What sort of a wager?" Watson said curiously.
There was a keen look in the doctor's eye, and Sherlock abruptly recalled the Mary Watson of six months ago, a vast representation of "motherhood" clad in muted purple plush, gently adjusting his lapels and saying, "Sherlock, do let me be clear that if you ever again encourage my dear husband to gamble that-" followed by a sequence of strikingly graphic threats. She'd never stopped smiling, either. Perhaps, he considered, a financial wager wasn't the wisest choice.
"A gingerbread cake," he considered, "Made by your wife. That soft stuff with the marmalade glaze, none of the crispy muck. Against a bottle of my good Hungarian Tokay, says that I can present you with someone in a disguise so alien to their normal character and yet so perfect that you will never realize they aren't exactly who they appear to be."
Watson smiled, and extended a hand to shake.
"My dear fellow, you have a bet. I shall look forward to that Tokay."
The Royal London Hospital
Molly frowned up at the consulting detective who had blithely interrupted her morning's rounds.
"I apologize," she said to the patient, a new mother who had (along with her baby) barely survived a nightmarish caesarian delivery for placenta previa, one of the first of those procedures in which Molly had been the lead surgeon, "This is terribly unprofessional of me."
"It's all right, my dear," said the patient, batting her eyes at Sherlock, "I remember what it's like to have an impetuous beau."
Sherlock, damn him, was flirting with Molly's patient, as he did to almost everyone except Molly. Who always did what he wanted anyway, damn her.
She escorted him to the doctor's lounge and sat, drinking stewed tea, as he explained his latest brilliant idea.
"That's… that's mad, Mr. Holmes."
"It's not, it's genius. Think of the opportunity, Molly! You'll get to do what you really want-"
"And you'll get to show up your friend," Molly interjected drily, setting down her tea and swishing her voluminous blue skirts as she walked past him to the supply cabinet.
"You'll be a real doctor!" Sherlock exclaimed, as Molly drew out an injection kit.
Molly turned slowly.
"I am a real doctor, Mr. Holmes. I was in the twelfth graduating class of the London School of Medicine-"
"For Women. This would be real work. Like a man's."
He dodged, adroitly, and the bedpan she had whipped at his head barely missed him.
"By which, I mean, of course," Sherlock said, "That you are an extraordinarily skilled and well-trained physician, particularly in the forensic sciences, and due to the unfortunate fact of your sex you're confined to delivering babies rather than using those skills on something useful."
"The babies and their mothers might disagree with you, Mr. Holmes!" Molly scolded him, "And anyway, I'm too… I'm too petite to be a man!"
"Men aren't petite, they're short," Sherlock contradicted, "And that's part of the genius. Have you heard of the Napoleon complex? You'll get to be far more aggressive which will act as an additional layer of security."
Molly, frankly, was feeling quite aggressive just then anyway. But after telling him to bugger off she came to the gradual realization over the next few hours that she was, absolutely, going to do it.
She always had, ever since he'd been ten and she'd been six and he'd talked her into balancing on his shoulders so that she could retrieve an empty robin's nest he'd wanted to inspect. From that moment on, she'd been his friend.
Though for his part Sherlock would probably have referred to her more as "useful accomplice." She'd assisted him in his dissections, held the beakers for his chemical experiments (and the broom when those invariably went explosively wrong), and in general, the two had been inseparable.
Their parents had even, tentatively, begun to think their two awkward, clever children might make a match of it in a few years. Molly, being the daughter of the village doctor, wasn't quite of Sherlock's rank… but he was only a third son anyway, there were the other two who could marry well if the pair had wanted to make a go of it.
"Not bloody likely," Molly thought with a snort, "Given he thinks of my sex as an "unfortunate fact."
But then, when Molly was just about to put her skirts down and her hair up, Sherlock had headed off to Oxford, been very rapidly sent down, and then installed himself in London like a tick in a dog's ear. After that he almost never returned to the bucolic Sussex village where they had both been born.
He'd been rather a surprise to her when she'd encountered him in the women's clinic in Poplar where she'd been doing some of her foundation training. He'd been tracking down a murderer who preyed upon… well, upon ladies of the evening, which a lot of women in Poplar were, if not exclusively, at least some of the time. For his part, upon seeing Molly, Sherlock had blinked slowly, failed to greet her or in any way acknowledge the passage of a decade, and then had immediately resumed drafting her into his schemes.
Like this one. Really, Molly thought… just to win a bet.
And he wasn't bloody wrong, was the thing.
There had slowly been some grudging acceptance that women could be useful in the sorts of medicine where modesty would keep patients from seeing a male physician, or (frankly) in the sorts of medicine that men didn't want to do.
But Molly had always dreamed of research. To advance the studies of pathology, to understand the root causes of disease… that was where she had shone. As a student, she'd been top of her class, and when she'd finished, she'd applied to the three schools in London that provided advanced training in forensic medicine. Which respectively had:
-Laughed in her face
-Politely declined even to interview her
-Gave a false and infuriating diatribe on how the female mind is unsuited to the rigors of the dissecting room
Given no alternative, Molly had retreated quietly into the feminine doctor ghetto, and as Sherlock had said, delivered babies. It was good and meaningful work. She saved lives, brought new lives into the world...
But what if she could be something she had truly been passionate about? Even if it meant she had to stop being something else?
In time for the noon mail delivery, Molly scrawled a quick note and sent it off to Sherlock's house in Baker Street. The response came with the five o'clock reply service.
Tomorrow. Here. -S
221 B Baker Street
Molly stood in Sherlock's mahogany-paneled dressing room and frowned at herself in the mirror. It wasn't that the tweed men's suit coat and trousers didn't fit… they did, extremely well, to the point where she had to wonder how Sherlock had such a clear idea of her measurements.
But they fit… oddly. Molly was a decent woman, who'd worn a corset her entire adult life, and her unbound abdomen under her starched white shirtfront felt rather scandalously louche.
Still, there was nothing for it. Tugging at her lapels, Molly strode out into the sitting room.
Where Sherlock's mouth dropped open slightly, and he stared.
"What?" Molly asked defensively.
"Um… well, your… limbs. Legs," Sherlock mumbled.
Molly's knees folded in instinctively, and she asked, "What's wrong with them?"
"Oh, um," Sherlock stammered, "Nothing. I just haven't seen quite so much of them in some time."
He cleared his throat, and gestured to a table on which a head form sat bearing a short wig, the same color as Molly's natural hair.
"How is it going to… fit?" she asked. Her hair was to her waist, and heavy, and she wasn't inclined to cut it.
Sherlock blinked, cleared his throat again, and said, "Old actor's trick. If… if you'll sit here, I can show you."
Somewhat hesitantly, Sherlock stepped behind her where she sat on a chair. Carefully, he pulled half of the heavy mass of Molly's chestnut hair off to one side, began braiding it into a single long, loose plait. And if Molly had to suppress an involuntary shiver at the brush of his acid-scarred violinists fingertips across her neck, she was proud to say she suppressed it very well. In fact she pulled the other half of her hair off to the other side and duplicated his motions.
Together, they wove the plaits into a crown round Molly's haid and tucked on a cap and the wig. Then Sherlock knelt at her feet and gently applied a thin layer of spirit gum to her upper lip, before affixing a mustache.
His bright blue eyes fixed on her brown ones as he looked curiously into her face. Molly swallowed. He hadn't been this close to her in… well, ever, really.
"Very good," Sherlock said, grinning widely, "Shall we begin?"
Regent's Park
"No, try it again, Manfred-"
"Does it absolutely have to be Manfred, what a horrid name," Molly grumbled.
"Horrible. A man would say horrible. In fact almost any woman over the age of ten would probably say horrible," Sherlock said, "Now walk straight, with wide strides. There aren't skirts cluttering your ankles, you don't need to sway your bottom like that to clear them."
Molly eyeballed him. He was watching her bottom.
Then she walked straight, with wide strides, cutting through the new fallen snow.
"Better," Sherlock agreed, tapping the brass head of his walking stick on his chin consideringly, "But let's try it again with a limp."
The Mortuary, Barts Hospital
"Well, while it's difficult to say for certain given the amount of decomposition, the lungs remain free of aspirated water so he was probably already dead when he went into the Thames? Cyanosis of the lips and fingernails, edoematous fluid in the lungs… differential diagnosis would be asphyxiation, I should say? But I'm not really seeing any signs of mechanical suffocation or mechanical injury. There's some thickening of the aortic intima, injury to the gastric mucosa… I suspect he may have drunk himself to death? Possibly in a situation where his death would cause trouble for some compatriots and so they attempted to dispose of his corpse?"
"No, wrong, let's try it again."
Looking up from the microscope with the endothelial slide she'd been examining, Molly frowned at Sherlock.
"I really do think it's right, Mr. Holmes."
"Holmes."
"I really do think it's right, Holmes."
"Of course it's right, Hooper. But you're a man now. You don't think-"
"I've often noticed that."
"Ha, ha. You don't think things. You know them. With an unbreakable rock-hard certainty. Try it again, with that confidence."
221B Baker Street
"Damn your insolence, Holmes!"
"No, no, no, no, NO!"
Sherlock pulled a hand through his hair, disarranging it into the wild curls Molly remembered from her youth, and glared at her.
"You wouldn't intimidate a cat like that. Try it again."
Molly rolled her eyes and said, "Damn your insolence Holmes," in a flat tone.
"You aren't even trying at this point, are you?"
"I am trying, Mr. Holmes," Molly wailed, "But it's so… unpleasant. I don't want to be so awful to everyone."
"Molly!" Sherlock grinned incredulously at her, "That's the best bit of being a man!"
"It's not natural," she snapped, "Do you people realize how nonsensical you are?"
"No, of course we don't, that's the beauty of it, we don't have to!" Sherlock exclaimed
"Really?" Molly asked. Because really.
"Not a bit. The world is designed and modeled around us. It's wonderful."
He rose to his feet, and stood in front of Molly.
"Try it with me. I am a man," Sherlock coaxed.
"I am a man," Molly agreed.
"Ordained by divine right the master of the universe. I am the master of the universe!"
"I am the master of the universe!"
"I bestride the world like a conqueror," Sherlock shouted.
"I BESTRIDE THE WORLD LIKE A CONQUEROR," Molly bellowed in a deep voice.
"I can do anything and everything that I wish!"
"I CAN DO ANYTHING!" Molly said and apparently she'd got a bit overexcited by all the shouting because she then grabbed Holmes by the lapels, dragged him down to her level, and kissed him.
For a moment Sherlock stood still in shock, but then his mouth softened against hers and his hands crept onto her hips under her coat. Molly twined her arms around his neck and they stood there, lips on lips, for a few thousand years. Or for less than a second. She couldn't have said.
Then Molly came to her senses and pulled back. Sherlock raised a hand to his mouth curiously.
"I'm… I'm so sorry, Mr. Holmes," Molly stammered, "I didn't mean-"
"No, no," Sherlock said, "It's all right. It's just-"
He quirked a small smile at her.
"Could you try it again, without the mustache?"
After a harried search for a solvent that would dissolve spirit gum, Molly did. Quite thoroughly.
Some time later, a suburban street in Chiswick
Doctor Watson handed his overcoat and hat to the housemaid Jane with a nod of thanks, eased his boots off with the bootjack.
"Dinner for an hour from now?" he asked the girl.
"Cook's bang on schedule, Doctor Watson."
"Very good."
Watson then put on his house shoes and trailed into the parlor, where Mary, the sleeves of her white shirtwaist rolled above her elbows, was washing the baby in an old footbath in front of a roaring fire. Rosie splashed her plump palms onto the surface of the water and declaimed a stream of pleased gibberish, to which her mother replied, "Yes, darling, isn't it?"
John poured himself a brandy from the decanter on the sideboard and sat down next to his small illustration of the domestic pleasures, kissing Mary on her smooth cheek and letting Rosie grip hold of his forefinger.
"How was your day?" Mary asked, running a wet flannel over Rosie's bald pate.
"Intriguing," John replied, "Though I may need to ask you to make a gingerbread cake."
"Why's that?"
"Holmes has found himself a sweetheart."
Mary blinked at him, and said, "That's… I mean that's lovely, and rather startling, but I don't see how the one follows on the other."
"Holmes and I wagered, a cake against a bottle of his good Tokay, that he could teach anyone to disguise themselves so well that I could never even recognize it as a disguise."
"All right?" Mary said.
"And so he's found this girl, dressed her as a man, installed her as the new pathologist at Barts, and had her pretend to detest him."
Mary's shoulders sagged slightly.
"Oh, dear," she sighed, "But he was able to fool you?"
"God no," Watson snorted, "She's five feet two with delicate lady's hands and a slender neck. And that's before you take into account the way he's mooning like a lovesick moron and giving her calf-eyes every time he thinks I can't see."
Mary arched a dark brow, and commented, "On the first occasion you and I went out together I seem to recall you telling me a very moving anecdote of Afghanistan in which a musket looked into your tent at the dead of night, and how you fired a double-barrelled tiger cub at it."
John chuckled.
"How do you think I recognize the symptoms? No, he didn't fool me, my gift for noticing women remains intact. And while I would very much have liked to have his Tokay-"
He kissed Mary, on the mouth this time.
"They're having too much fun for now for me to spoil it."