Chapter Text
When magic came into the world, an awful lot of things changed. There were accountants who woke up one moon to discover they were werewolves and politicians forced to admit to their constituents that they might be witches. There were youths stolen by fairies and rest home patients who could read minds a thousand miles away. There was a lot of hurried legislation to write and quite a lot of marital breakdowns, but most people managed to escape with their lives relatively unchanged.
John and Sherlock were not in the latter category. The first time John got pregnant, it was rather a shock, in fact. They had barely prepared themselves before the squalling child was delivered (six pounds one ounce) by a confused junior doctor. He was brought into the world in a bloody caesarean mess behind a curtain in a shared ward, because by the time Sherlock convinced the doctors that yes, honestly, we’ve been doing tests for sometime now and there is a baby in there, it was too late to find arrange a private room.
But, well, father and baby seemed healthy, so they took the brand new person home to Baker St and stared at it for a while.
“He’s drowning,” Sherlock said.
“I think he’s okay,” John frowned. He was propped up on the couch, unable to move much because of the sutures on his abdomen.
“But there’s so much saliva,” Sherlock sounded on the verge of weeping, which Sherlock never did so perhaps it was just a cold or something. “How does he breathe?”
The baby began to cry. It seemed evident that he was upset about not having a fully-developed sentience and theory of mind yet, so Sherlock tried patting the back of his hand in the hope of consoling him. Sherlock could not believe how small it was. The pad of his index finger was as large as the baby’s palm.
“Oh, God,” John said. “Formula. We haven’t got any formula. How did we not think of that?”
They rushed out with John wincing every step and the baby in a makeshift sling made out of Sherlock’s best silk scarf. There was a Tesco open late and a stocky checkout woman with bags under her eyes who refused to speak to them. Sherlock paid for nappies and wipes with his credit card and called John ‘sweetheart’ just to inflame the checkout woman. She crossed herself as they pushed the trolley away, with the baby snuggled in a nest made of John’s navy-blue jersey and Sherlock’s second-best wool scarf. Both would be urinated on a few minutes later.
They called him Geoffrey, because Lestrade was the only person both of them agreed that they liked and neither of them could stand the pink and blue websites with lists of baby names. On the birth certificate, they wrote ‘unknown’ under ‘mother’.
Sherlock survived the first few months on two hours sleep a night. John did less well, even after he managed to convince the hospital to give him maternity leave for a year. Bringing Geoffrey to crime scenes proved nigh impossible. Either he was crying too much or, when he was not crying, Sherlock became distracted at inopportune moments and wanted to check that Geoffrey was still breathing. John had to stay at home most days watching the baby while Sherlock went out solving crimes and then coming home and complaining because John hadn't been there to talk to.
"I can't leave Geoffrey home alone."
"Why not? Mrs Hudson can check on him every now and then."
"He's fragile. He needs constant attention."
"He's a Holmes! We are not fragile. We're very independent."
"He's a Holmes-Watson. And he's a month old."
Money got tighter, but Sherlock procured what donations he could from private clients. He got very angry when John started calling them clients.
“Makes me sound like a prostitute,” he snarled.
“Stop grizzling. You had better take up bloody street-walking if we need the money,” John snapped, nursing Geoffrey in the crook of his arm. They were both at the ends of their tethers, in each other’s hair, chomping at the bit, driving each other round the bend, and every other proverb in between. Proverbs were made for domestic difficulties like this.
Sherlock stormed off, slamming his bedroom door, and Geoffrey began to howl. John couldn’t get him to stop until Sherlock reappeared like a phantasm at his elbow, his hair askew. Together they hummed the choruses of various show tunes (alternating to a new one as soon as one of them forget the rest of the melody) until the baby settled into weepy hiccoughs.
---
“I thought you’d find this intolerable,” John said one night, when Geoffrey had been blessedly napping for a miraculous two whole hours. His colic was beginning to clear and they’d been recommended a wonderful nappy rash cream: they were both gasping at the breathing space they knew would end as soon as the first tooth started coming through.
Sherlock was updating his website to tell his readers they should stop sending bubbly blue ‘Congratulations!’ cards or he would hunt down each and every single one of them and personally shove their respective Hallmarks down their throats.
“I find almost every person I meet to be irritating, unintelligent, illogical in their behaviour and quite often rather smelly,” Sherlock said without looking up from the laptop screen. “Knowing the spawn is from my own loins and likely to improve with patience is a pleasant change.”
John thought about this for a moment, wrapping his hands around his fresh cup of tea, then asked, “Is that your way of saying you quite like being a dad?”
“All I’m saying is that I believe our son is going to make the world a bit less boring,” Sherlock replied, and then paused in his typing. “Actually, I think he already has. From my perspective.”
John pecked Sherlock on the top of his head, “He loves you too,” he smiled into Sherlock’s thick curls.
As John headed off to Sherlock’s bedroom to catch a few winks of sleep (they were slowly setting up the upstairs as a nursery), Sherlock called after him, “That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t look into this magical male contraceptive they’ve developed.”
“Tell me about it tomorrow,” John yawned, shutting the door as quietly as possible to keep from waking Geoffrey up.
---
A few weeks later, Geoffrey was just hitting six months and beginning to roll over on his own and make facial expressions like a real person. One morning in a Wandsworth park, Sherlock was crouched over a corpse with Lestrade looking over his shoulder when he heard Donovan announce, “Oi, Freak-Junior approaching at seven o’clock.”
Sherlock growled and was very close to actually saying something unpleasant to Sally (he considered the sort of things he usually said to her to be merely harsh truths) when he saw the look on John’s face and stood up.
“What’s wrong? Is Geoffrey sick?”
(Lestrade suddenly flushed from his neck to his eyeballs and cleared his throat at the sky, as he did every single time Geoffrey was mentioned in his presence).
John was lugging the baby in a carrier by his side, and shook his head. “Can I talk to you for a second?”
“Go ahead,” Sherlock frowned, indicating the assembled forensic team as if they were merely ornamental hedges rather than ravenous rumour-machines.
“In private,” John said through gritted teeth.
“But the rain’s not going to keep for more than a few more minutes, and I need to see if there’s any blood on the bike stands to confirm my theory,” Sherlock said briskly. “What is it?”
John took two rapid breaths as if preparing himself to plunge into a freezing lake, shot a glare at Lestrade and Anderson as if daring them to laugh, and then looked at Sherlock and said. “I’m pregnant. Again.”