Work Text:
Martha didn’t have much to do these days.
She had formed a routine, before. She would visit the boys, to fuss over them and chide them for whatever nasty whiff of London’s underworld they had tracked into the house that week.
She was always on the outside looking in with those two. Everyone was. She rarely asked them about their cases- she talked to them more about groceries and the telly than she did about whatever crime scene they’d been to that day. But she read John’s blog from Mrs Turner’s computer next door, and left comments from her account, and that was alright, that was safe. She wasn’t disturbing anyone.
She brought them tea, and tidied up their things, and made them breakfast, and that was alright too, to be a part of their furniture. She’d always reminded them that she was not their housekeeper, because it was true. Housekeepers made tea and meals and cleared away dust and cobwebs because it was their job. She hadn’t worked for them. She’d been a part of their lives, a passable likeness of a mother or a sister. She was permitted to poke her head into their little dominion, to drop in and out before returning to her home beneath them, the quiet foundation of their makeshift family. Martha and her boys.