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“Now listen here...” Joan begins, channeling Emmaline Pankhurst and every woman who had stood up to the autocratic pronouncements of men for eons. Joan Haydn Watson, retired Captain, former surgeon, practicing GP, feminist, cannot believe what she just heard.
In this second, she’s questioning every romantic choice she ever made, right back to Bobby McMurry in Year Eight. Honestly, she wouldn’t have considered living with Sherlock, let alone dating with him, let alone marrying the bastard, if he hadn’t been outspoken about his equal hatred of all people, regardless of sex or gender. She’d had enough of advocating for feminism to louts and patriarchal fools in the Army, though it really was pretty progressive, thank you very much, and had never planned on marrying someone who was such a patriarchal asshat. She was Third Wave Watson, and she didn’t need that shit in her house and in her bed. However, there was no other answer for it.
Now, she knew full well that she had married Sherlock, and she was of half a mind to laugh in his face and haul him to divorce court. Or Mycroft. Apparently if they divorced, their paperwork was to be handled by the British Government. Joan got to choose the lawyers, though. All in all, it was a compromise she was glad to have suggested.
She would have thought that Sherlock would know one of the most basic tenants of equality. You do not look down your sharp, posh, Harrow educated nose and tell a woman about her body as if she’s too stupid to know her own physiology. This was so past a bit not good that it was almost laughable. “I don’t need you, you great git, to tell me fuck all about my body. It’s my body, and I’m not pregnant! Christ.”
It is then, as Sherlock looks her up and down, that Joan realizes she’s surged to her feet, over the body that she’d been crouched down next to, so as to examine.
Lestrade is staring.
Sherlock grins, that awful Cheshire grin of his, but it fades after a second, after he realizes that this is a bit more than a bit not good.
“Ah, mood swings.” He intones, and Joan wants to bash his head in, “Terribly symptomatic, though overblown in the modern media. Rubbish, of course. You are a bit ahead, these don’t usually happen until later in the pregnancy. Octavia is a genius, developing well ahead of-.”
Joan spluttered, and Sherlock stopped talking. “We are not calling-” Joan broke off, annoyed that she was once again getting swept away by the Bat of Baker Street.
The way he’d said Octavia, so like there was really was someone in his life with that name, set off something to clanging in Joan’s head, and a warmth bloomed in her heart. “Sherlock.” They hadn’t talked about this in some time. Sherlock had been indifferent to the idea of children, all told. It didn’t matter, because she wasn’t pregnant, but...they needed to talk, didn’t they?
There was a long pause. Joan heard the click of the camera, the scurrying of techs, Anderson’s voice floating down towards her over the crowds that were surrounding them in the park. Thankfully, Donovan was at the perimeter, and the only person to really hear this was Lestrade, who had heard enough of his brother-in-law’s pronouncements to pull his jaw together after a moment. “Sherlock...” Lestrade begins, clearing his throat, “The victim...”
o-o-o-o-o-o-o
Upon sweeping into the scene, Sherlock had leaned down over the posed body in Kensington Gardens, a woman in a Yves Saint Laurent gown, and picked up her wrist. Joan had wondered why he was checking for a pulse. The woman was dead, her throat slit. He’d inhaled, and Joan found herself glad that Donovan wasn’t around. She hadn’t been of a mind to hear the f-word this morning. “Woody undertones to her scent, earthy and lush. But also a cloying note of sweat and pooling blood.”
After his lovely little pronouncement that made her wonder if he needed an evaluation for waxing on about how good a dead body smelled, he’d looked at Joan carefully. She’d shook her head, “She was walking in a forest?” Joan had known she was being, as Sherlock would say, dull, but it brought her joy to bedevil him. Joan did not smell anything remotely chemical on the woman’s body, nor did she suspect that poisoning had been the cause of death. This was a dump site in the middle of Kensington Gardens, a place meant to make a statement, not at all the place to slit someone’s throat without anyone seeing.
Sherlock had snapped, “Don’t be dull, Joan. She smells like you, though admittedly less alluring. She’s pregnant.”
Joan had heard Lestrade breathe deeply. Joan, for herself, had laughed. “I’m not...I’m not pregnant, Sherlock.” Joan glanced around, quickly, and then back at Sherlock, “It’s a bit not good, really, to equate a non-pregnant person with a pregnant one. You don’t do that.”
Joan left the dead bit off, but he’d needed to understand social convention before they got into some kind of argument at Sainsbury’s, which she now had to shop at because she was banned from the Tesco’s Express. She hadn’t been really concerned about Sherlock’s deduction until that moment, because he did not recant his deduction. He might’ve been pulling some weird joke, but even he could tell the difference between the living and the dead, and there were some things about which William Sherlock Scott Holmes did not joke.
No, she hadn’t been worried, until Sherlock had looked utterly frustrated at her inability to see but not observe, smell but not deduce.
She’d looked at Lestrade for help, but he was biting hard on his lips, sucking air through his nose. He was trying not to laugh.
Joan, for her part, knew that she had gained a bit since her Army days, but she was a short woman, shaped like a jelly bean, if one was one going to be honest, with boobs and ample thighs. She was built like her Watson side, and she envied her twin’s willowy body, with her perky, small breasts and leggy strides. However, she had long ago come to see her body as an agent of her power, a tool for her usage, and a vessel for her mind. She had never let her insecurities get in the way of sex, either. Her body was powerful, and she knew it well, knew it well enough to know that it was hers, and hers alone. There were no embryos to be found in her body.
“Is this what I must look forward to in the next 37 weeks?” Sherlock’s soft voice had risen after a second, “I will explain myself as though Anderson were standing next to you and not listening in to a conversation between a man and his wife...” here he’d spoken up more, clearly not to her, “...which I do assure Anderson, are quite privileged, and are thereby none of Scotland Yard’s concern.” He shot the man a dirty look, and Joan knew that if she didn’t do something, he was going to get into it with Anderson, because Sherlock was the one to blurt this out over a dead body, and nobody, least of all Anderson, least of all her, wants to see Sherlock sulk because Anderson told him he was in the wrong.
“Sherlock!” Lestrade shouted, clearly of the same mind as Joan.
He’d rolled his eyes, “In pregnancy, even very early pregnancy, there is a increase in basal metabolic rate, which increases blood supply to the body, ranging from the armpits, to the vagina, and yes, the wrists, if one is keen enough to pick up on the scent. That process emits a scent that is quite unique. You both smell the same, minus the note of death...”
“Thank fuck for that!” Joan had interjected, and Sherlock had steamrolled along.
“Thereby, you are both pregnant.” Sherlock had finished triumphantly. He’d no doubt expected his daily praise, and instead had been met with a loudly hissed rejoinder. “It is a mere bit of logic, Joan, and is supported by prior observation of my odious second cousins and Mycroft’s and Lestrade’s surrogate.”
“Why did you sniff Cathy?” Lestrade blustered, horrified, but unsurprised.
Sherlock had said, dully, “Data, Lestrade, don’t be absurd.”
Joan thought about how he’d actually outlined the logic table for her to examine. It was an odd gesture, one that didn’t help at all.
o-o-o-o-o-o-o
Sherlock pulled Joan out of her thoughts.
“You were going to say something. Proceed.” He pressed, clicking the ‘d’ in that way that either made her weak in the knees or annoyed, depending on the day and the hour. Right now she was so very far past annoyed, it wasn’t even funny. “I will not have you succumbing to so-called pregnancy brain, Joan. It will not do.” Then his eyes took on something sharp and glittery, and Joan knew exactly what he had been reading on his laptop for the past three days, “Studies have shown that pregnancy brain does not exist, as such. What really occurs is that a brain cannot toggle between one task and another quickly and...”
“Yes, thank you.” Joan broke in, waspishly, trying to make sure that she was not hallucinating. Nope. Lestrade was still there. And fuck, there came Donovan. It was going to be all over the Yard by morning that Sherlock was making fun of his broody wife, or was broody himself. “I do have a medical degree. You’re also wrong. Pregnancy brain can be blamed on hormones and the development of neural pathways that help new mothers to cope with the demands of parenting.”
“In any case, such things are rooted in worry. I do not understand why such an emotion would apply to you, Joan, given that you have long desired children.” Sherlock simply continued on, “Why else did we marry, go through the demands of the social conventions imposed upon us by Mummy, if not to provide her the grandchildren she so clearly desires?”
Just like that, the warm feeling that had strangely bloomed inside of her when he’d talked about Octavia, like there was more to his strange pronouncement than a biological supposition faded in a flash of red-hot anger that gave way to sadness, inexplicably. Sherlock did not want children. He was following Mummy’s marching orders. This wasn’t about Joan. This was about a bloody checkbox, and he was making fun of a desire she had, even though he no doubt considered it to be dull and pedestrian.
In that moment, Joan knew that they would never agree. They’d agreed to revisit the matter. She had long ago put aside her occasional musing about a dark haired child. They had been normal. He was so good with Lestrade’s daughters, because he talked to them like people, because they answered him without judgement. She had once dreamed, lightly, about giving them both a child. But if his reaction was to blurt out his suppositions in a crowd, to bring up Mummy, to say those things that had had, well, then, Joan knew that they were nowhere near ready, and perhaps this was his way of reminding her of their unsuitability as parents.
Joan stormed off, past Donovan, past Anderson, past the techs, past the tape, past the tube station, past the tourists trying to get to the crime scene, but not before she heard Lestrade scolding Sherlock. What she did not see was him standing there, and cocking his head, listening, in the middle of a dump site in Kensington Garden.
Joan didn’t even bother to stop and help the American tourist group she busted up on her way past Donovan. They could find their way to Harrods to buy overpriced tea alone. They saw, but they did not observe. If they had gotten Starbucks, bloody overpriced swill that it was, chances were they had been not 90 meters from the damn storefront.
After a time, Joan knew what to do. After skulking around London, wishing she had her gun in her trousers, she goes home, pretends that the conversation never happened. She considers making a salad to prove a point, but decides that if Sherlock is going to tiptoe around the flat, he can tiptoe down to the Thai place and get her a curry. As she eats, he looks at her, waiting, but not eating himself. Joan does not ask what he is waiting for.
It soon becomes clear that her husband is deluded, and actually believed his pronouncement that he can smell pregnancy, like some kind of lemur. She ignores the jar of folic acid in the cupboard the next morning, and slams the cupboard, wondering why she can’t quite get over the way he’d reacted to the idea. It had been his own, after all, and there hadn’t been one bit of sense to his pronouncement, nor his actions now. Joan refused to allow herself to analyze her feelings.
Her annoyance was rational. If he was going to do the shopping, he could have gotten some milk. Joan lets the door slam shut, hiding her jam in the door. They’re out, and she wants tea. Joan puts on her oatmeal sweater, goes to the clinic to work, and wonders why this nagging feeling in her in her gut that Sherlock, with his insistence that his delusion is correct, might actually be correct. On Tuesday, she wakes up with a pillow pushing her over on her side.
Finally, she decides that they’re going to settle the matter, because she can’t take the unspoken questions, both in her heart and in the flat. She has the morning off from the clinic, and Sherlock muttered something about an email case, so Joan pulls on the blue sweater that makes her eyes pop and pulls on her coat and heads to the lab. He won’t even know that she’s gone.
Molly seems to have been expecting her, for she seems excited to run the test in only the way that Molly can be about things like kittens and babies and pink. Joan draws her own blood, and unties the the tourniquet with her teeth. As they wait, Joan awkwardly tries to chat with Molly. “So, uhm, I guess you heard from Les...”
Before she could finish, Molly breaks in, “Oh, no. Sherlock told me that I was to keep any and all teratogens away from you, as best I was able. He also asked me, and I quote, if I had any books on the subject.”
“What?” Joan splutters. “He...”
“Yes.” Molly giggles, moving around her lab with a glittery kitten themed pen. “I sent him to Waterstones. Told him to ask the shop.”
“You didn’t.” Joan breathes, loving how Molly can manage Sherlock. She is a great friend, keen and eager, sure, but bright and devious, even if her deviousness is sweet. She’s iron, and she had the ovaries to boldly ship Sherlock off to Waterstones, where he reorganizes books and annoys staff, in the guise of being helpful.
“I did.” Molly confirms her deviousness with a wide smile. “He even texted, asked if he should be worried by amount of conflicting data.”
Joan can’t help but laugh. He’s gotten kicked out of Waterstones for reading a book and putting it away, mostly because they couldn’t believe he read so quickly. The endorphins give her an idea, a way to settle this, and prove to her husband that he is not always right. “Hey, Molly?”
Molly looks up from her microscope. “Hm?”
“Would you mind not telling me, putting the results in an envelope, and sealing it?” Joan asks, “I know it’s a lot to ask, but...”
“But you want to find out with Sherlock.” Molly finishes with a wide smile.
Joan does not correct her. In a sense, Molly is right. The image of opening the envelope together suddenly overwhelms any feeling on triumph she’d imaged at the thought of proving Sherlock wrong. She had originally thought to brandish the envelope, sealed, and allow him to deduce that she had not, in any way, altered the document. She'd hoped that the proof on the page would settle the matter, and he would be wrong without any way to assert that she'd simply not collected the data properly.
The reason why hits her on the steps to 221B. She very much wants Sherlock to be right, in this, if nothing else, and for her own reasons.
And if he is, they are having a very long talk about keeping one’s deductions to oneself, as well as one about his awful idea that Mummy would have anything to do with her continuation of her pregnancy. If, in the end, they are agreed upon keeping the baby, if there is even a pregnancy and a baby at the end of it all, her name will not be Octavia.