Chapter Text
Clever red foxy, so far from your den
Are you as innocent as you pretend?
The fox was having trouble.
He had found a young rabbit earlier, quite fresh and practically untouched, and it had made a good meal. He’d eaten some late berries left on the brambles. He’d washed all that down with a long drink from a cool, running stream.
In spite of all this, he found himself craving tea.
And he knew what tea was, had a vague idea of leaves in water that tasted better than leaves gone soggy in a puddle, and warmth, and milk, or some lemon if no milk was to be had.
He also knew the rabbit had likely died of fright—there were clear signs that it had been handled and released, probably by children unaccompanied by someone who would have known better than to pick up a kit. He knew that the bramble-berries were properly called Rubus fruticosus. He knew that if he looked at the water through the correct configuration of lenses, he would see little wriggling animalcules that would put him right off drinking it.
This was too much for a fox-shaped mind to handle. It hurt, almost, like a lead weight sitting at the base of his skull, and somehow knowing what lead weights were and being aware that he had a skull made it worse. The fox tried to scratch at the back of his neck, and when that didn’t do anything significant, he curled up under the bramble bush, hoping the discomfiting un-foxness would be gone when he woke up.
He had barely closed his eyes when a rustling made him look up. A blackbird was perched low in the branches above his head.
Turdus merula, thought the fox. Omnivorous. Partially migratory at this latitude. Distinctive song. Disgustingly popular in folklore.
“Oh, hello,” said the blackbird. “Don’t mind me. I won’t stay long—I’m only waiting out that hawk turning and turning in the widening gyre up there, and they can’t fly her forever. Er. Please don’t eat me. A right hash I’d have made of it, if I hid from the hawk only for you to eat me.”
The fox blinked. He wasn’t hungry now, and, even if he had been, he didn’t think he would have felt inclined to eat this particular bird. It sounded like something—someone—he should know, right along with tea and...tea and biscuits.
He would definitely have eaten a biscuit. A sugary one, with ginger in it.
He flicked his tail to one side, inviting the bird to come closer, and it hopped down from the branch to the ground, though it stayed at a careful distance from his teeth.
“Thanks. Say, can you understand me?” The bird turned its head to look at the fox with each bright black eye. “You do, I know it! Fancy that. I’ve been in these woods for days, and the only other thing I’ve been able to talk to is a half-witted nightingale and I think she was just trying to be polite.” He pushed a wing feather into place with his shiny yellow beak, looking thoughtful. “She was a girl once, or I’ll eat my hat. Well. I’d eat my hat if I had it, though in this shape, I’d probably be better off making a nest in it. Were you someone too?”
“I might have been.” Those were the first words the fox could remember speaking—or at least the first words he’d needed in a long while. He yawned, and the blackbird darted back instinctively when his sharp teeth closed like a trap. “What do you think of tea?”
She was devastatingly clever, all quick wit and astonishing depths of knowledge. It was no surprise that Sherlock was drawn to her when she came to his mother’s court. He’d not been able to hold a decent conversation with anyone since he’d left university (or rather had been made to leave, which still rankled - wasn’t unambitious study supposed to be a desirable trait in second sons?) and the sorceress Mary was a breath of fresh air.
Her husband, however, who arrived some weeks later with a baggage train carrying what must have been most of a wizard’s tower, minus the stone and mortar and shingle—oh, he was like the cigarettes Sherlock smoked furtively behind the stables. Ordinary and intoxicating and addictive and forbidden.
The blackbird became a regular fixture in the fox’s days after that. As it turned out, he had very strong opinions about tea and was flexible on the subject of gingery biscuits. It...helped. The un-foxness didn’t go away, but it became easier to bear, less like it was something he had to shake off.
Apparently the bird felt the same way.
“I hope you don’t mind me hanging around,” he said one morning. “But talking to you reminds me that the feathers and wings isn’t who I am really, and I think that’s important.”
“I don’t mind,” said the fox. Truth to tell, he did mind a little today, but that was mostly because he was hungry and the blackbird was fluttering and bobbing right in front of his nose. Form defines function, but denying the foxy instincts felt familiar. He was almost certain he’d had practice controlling his...his transport.
“Thanks.” The bird gestured upwards with his beak. “It’s a falcon up there today. She must want me back very badly. I don’t think she meant for this to be permanent - that’s why I still have myself, to an extent - but I’m not keen on getting caught and finding out what else she has in store for me.” He turned his bright eyes to the fox. “Do you remember anything else yet?”
The fox shook his head. “I remember books. And a library with high windows, and the scent of ink and vellum. I liked books, I think.” He whined in frustration as the dark spaces between the oak shelves in his head turned into the shadows between tree trunks in the forest. He’d been so close, he’d almost had it. “That could be anywhere!”
“It’s a start.” The bird moved to a perch a little higher up: he recognized the snappish look. “Makes it that much more unlikely that you were a farmhand who stumbled into a witch’s garden. And you’re aware of an anywhere, so you might have been to more than one library. A scholar, maybe?”
“Maybe,” agreed the fox dully. It sounded nearly right, but still missed the mark, and he felt that he should be better at this sort of thing. “Do you know who you were?”
“Yes,” said the blackbird, and he left it at that. He flew away, keeping low betwixt the branches and the fox did not see him again until the next day.
Sherlock knew better. Of course he did.
One did not flirt with the husbands of sorceresses, no matter how charming they were, and especially not if you were a prince of the realm and the sorceress in question was there at your mother’s invitation. It might be argued that princes were expected to behave in certain ways, but Sherlock had always sneered at those members of the nobility who couldn’t keep it in their pants.
The problem was that it was difficult to avoid flirting if you didn’t know you were flirting in the first place. This should have been impossible for Sherlock, who detested inane, empty small talk and thought of the species of small talk designed to help people get a leg over as a special hell for the feeble-minded. And yet every time he spoke to John Watson, normal commentary on such innocent topics as the weather or the price of eggs became charged and laden with intent, with John lowering those eyelashes and licking his lips in that way of his and Sherlock unable to keep a smile from settling on his treacherous face.
If only John had told him to piss off when he deduced his military career from his face and his leg.
They knew better. Both of them did.
For his part, Sherlock was unused to such an alarming depth of feeling that he couldn’t dismiss through sheer force of will, and he found it easier to flee than confront the impulses that possessed him whenever he found himself alone with John Watson. The small gods alone knew what was going through John’s head, but he certainly clung to Mary like a limpet and was seldom seen without her.
Sherlock thought they were doing quite well until the two of them found themselves standing next to a dead body.