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Sherlock didn’t have many toys growing up.
First because his father didn’t allow them, and then because he was shipped away to boarding school. By the time he was free, he was an adult and no longer interested in childish comfort—or so he kept telling himself.
Joan’s tried to be sneaky about it, but any attempts at casual conversation are cut down as swiftly as she can bring them up. “What use is there dwelling on things that can never be changed,” Sherlock will ask, then leave in a manner suspiciously similar to fleeing. He must recognize the hypocrisy there, being an age regressor but not wanting to dwell on the past. Joan hardly has the heart to call him on it.
So Joan keeps a sharp eye out, mentally compiling a list of what appeals to Sherlock most. He loves his bees and he loves Clyde, clearly, but Joan wants to get him something more than plushies of his friends. Something he can actually play with.
The obvious starting point is puzzles. He’s liked them well enough in the past, even if there’s always been a thin layer of irony in his participation. Sherlock often struggles riding the fine line between resting his mind and becoming agitated from understimulation, and the results vary every time. What may soothe him on one day could push him toward a meltdown the next. And since puzzles come in all sizes, shapes, and difficulties, Joan can’t think of a better place to start.
The next time she heads out to the store, she gets to collecting. One extra large puzzle, one medium puzzle, and one baby puzzle, enough for each mindset. The real kicker, though, she has to custom order. The puzzle that’ll get her foot in the door.
She waits in anxious limbo for a week, and the second it arrives, Sherlock knows something’s amiss.
Not that he has to look too hard, seeing as the package came plastered in the toy company’s logo. It doesn’t take a detective to connect those dots.
“Watson, I hope this isn’t one of your well-meaning but terribly misguided attempts to aid my regression,” Sherlock says. “You know I don’t care much for toys.”
But Joan knows by now how to play this game. She shrugs. “Well, you don’t have to play with them if you don’t want to. They’re for me.”
Sherlock pauses, no doubt wondering what she’s scheming. Joan doesn’t let anything go unless she has a scheme in mind. “Excellent.”
“Excellent,” Joan says back. Sherlock retreats to the kitchen, but it’s clear he’s keeping one eye on her. She’ll have to make this an extra convincing performance.
Joan clears a space on the floor, pushing aside just enough old books and papers to make way for her puzzle. She upends the puzzle box, dropping all the pieces in a giant pile, and gets to work. Now, Joan doesn’t care much for puzzles. The most fun she ever had with them was putting them together on quiet Sunday afternoons with her stepfather, but she’s not trying to have fun here.
As she sets to work, she feels a bolt of nostalgia, a niggling of smallness in the back of her mind.
Joan’s known for a while that she’s regressed. After taking care of Sherlock for so long, after seeing how regression worked with her own eyes, she was bound to question it. After a little bit of required reading, she found it wasn’t as abnormal as she first thought. It’s a common stress response, just taken to its logical extreme with Sherlock.
Joan’s never fully regressed—not that she really has a desire to. She likes being capable and self-reliant, just as much as she likes feeling protected and cared for. It’s very rare that she feels small, much to Sherlock’s consternation. Like her, he has caregiver instincts that wax and wane, and she’s almost never capable of helping him satiate them.
The urge wanes quickly, but more importantly, her bait is successful. Sherlock, who is adamant that he can’t be tricked or manipulated, that he’s too smart for cheap tactics, inches closer, trying to catch a peek. He must be close to regressing, or at the very least, in need of a good cuddle.
Joan pretends not to see him. She’s been trained well enough in acting naturally when being watched, and while Sherlock is the one that taught her, his reaction will act as another piece of evidence, a measure of how regressed he really is.
It’s a balancing act, being just bad enough that it compels Sherlock to help without being bad enough to make him think she’s doing it on purpose. The bad news is that threshold is nearly nonexistent. The good news is that Sherlock makes special exceptions for Joan.
“Watson, I didn’t realize all it would take to best you is a thousand piece jigsaw puzzle.”
“Hey, it’s harder than it looks.” Granted, she did get one of the harder puzzles. It’s pure white, so finding the border pieces is like finding a needle in a haystack. She gets the distinct feeling her back while be aching before she even gets the border done.
“Yes, I’m familiar with the infamous milk puzzle.” Sherlock’s still feigning disinterest, but he’s inching closer. Hands clasped behind his back as he tries his hardest to look like he’s judging her. He just barely manages to look imperious. “Smart to start with the edges, but perhaps constructing an entire corner would behoove you more.”
Joan refrains from rolling her eyes. “Sure, I’ll do that as soon as I find a corner piece.”
Her measly progress speaks for itself. By some miracle, she’s managed to hook three border pieces in a row together, but other than that, she has little else to show. A diminutive pile of disconnected border pieces rests by her knee.
Sherlock spreads his hands. “Just a bit of advice.” Which is all he offers before he disappears downstairs, leaving Joan to work by her lonesome.
Joan blows out an irritated breath. She didn’t even get the chance to try and coax him to join her before he took off! Alright, so he’s aware of what she’s doing and completely unwilling to play along. That’s fine. Patience is rarely on his side, but even less so when he’s regressed.
Joan bides her time, knowing she just has to wait out the clock. The only problem is that she chose to work on the floor instead of on any of the tables, and her back is definitely starting to regret it. She shifts from slouching over the puzzle to lying on her stomach, though that just shifts the familiar ache from her lower back to her shoulders.
It's not long before she hears the familiar sounds of footsteps up the stairs. They hesitate as he spots her, then continue closer. There’s a pause before he speaks.
“Still?”
“Yeah. Still.” Though a glance at her phone tells her it’s only been an hour.
“That’s not very much.”
Mostly because she hadn’t been trying that hard. Joan had spent more time catching up on her emails than she had actually doing the puzzle, only snapping to attention when she heard Sherlock’s steps up the stairs.
“Guess I’m not as good at this as I thought.” Don’t think she missed that unmistakable cadence of his voice either. When he’s already feeling small, enough time away from Joan is enough to push him fully into headspace. Joan just didn’t think he’d come to her already regressed.
Sherlock crouches, plucking a single milk white piece up and, like magic, selects a near identical piece that perfectly slots into place. They’re not even border pieces, just random middle pieces he somehow knew would work together. Joan can’t help being impressed.
“That’s incredible, Sherlock,” Joan says. Another piece of evidence toward a case she’s already solved, the way he preens under her praise. He only accepts it when he’s small. “Do you think you could help me?”
He glances over the puzzle one last time, as if testing the waters before he takes that final plunge. “Can help, Joanie.”
And if the voice wasn’t a giveaway, if the nickname wasn’t a giveaway, the way he nestles up beside her so they’re sitting shoulder to shoulder would be.
Sherlock isn’t always the most accepting of physical touch. Sometimes he hates it, sometimes he clings to every scrap like it’s the last he’ll ever get. If he wants to cuddle up so close, that’s a good sign, but Joan can’t be jumping to conclusions here. She sits back and lets him work.
He’s got a sixth sense for this, able to pick out matching pieces at a single glance. Of course, he takes his own advice, building out from a single corner. The more she watches him, the more she realizes it’s a methodical method of elimination. Selecting a piece and comparing it to everything they have in the corner so far, discarding it if it doesn’t fit anywhere, but remembering the pattern for later.
Sherlock’s regression comes in levels instead of a straight drop, and each step requires the same level of attention and care. It’s all too easy for Sherlock to grow bored and pull himself back up—but that also means that Joan can never gauge just how small he’ll be once he fully settles.
If his progress is any indication, he still has some ways to go. His movements get slower and slower, the efficient precision finally going slack. He still manages to slot pieces together, but now it’s at a pace that Joan can finally replicate.
“Good job, Sherlock,” she says, when he manages to link a set of three to their steadily growing corner. “You’re so good at this!”
Sherlock smiles and ducks his head, too shy to reply verbally. In any other headspace, he’d deflect, saying it was all pattern recognition and strategic brute force. Now, he can only lap up the praise as it’s cooed at him.
However, Joan can only keep him busy for so long. The more he struggles, the quicker he’ll get bored. Meaning she’ll either have to find an easier puzzle or a new activity. She’ll have to see how dedicated he is to puzzle-solving at the moment.
When Joan starts connecting pieces quicker than Sherlock, she knows it’s time to call it quits. If the fact that he’s working one-handed wasn’t indication enough, his fingers tucked snugly between his lips.
That’s a hunger tell, so Joan checks her phone again. It’s close enough to lunchtime that she could ask.
“Sherlock?” she asks, waiting until those big eyes flicker in her direction before continuing. “Are you hungry? What do you say we break for lunch?”
He shakes his head, that classic stubbornness finally peeking out. “Not done yet.”
Far from it, as a matter of fact. But if Sherlock’s cognitive abilities keep steadily regressing, it’ll be tomorrow by the time they finally finish this puzzle.
Joan ventures a touch, smoothing down the tension in his shoulder blades. It’s a good sign that he melts. Looks like she’ll have her cuddle bug tonight. “It’s okay, Sherlock. It’ll be here in the morning.”
“What if Clyde eats it?”
Joan stifles a laugh behind a cough. “I think it’ll be okay. We’ll put the gate up so he can’t get to it, okay?”
Though reluctantly, Sherlock nods. He still has one piece trapped in a clumsy fist, which he jabs in every piece he can find before finally giving up the ghost.
Joan puts the gate around the puzzle, just so Clyde can have free roam. Sherlock gets antsy when he’s cooped up for too long, and Joan wouldn’t want to take away his freedom for the sake of a puzzle.
They order takeout because Joan’s in no mood to cook. The time spent on the floor has only exacerbated the pain in her back, so she can’t imagine standing over a stove for any period of time.
Joan turns on the television, selecting a children’s program at random, but it fails to hold Sherlock’s attention. His gaze drifts to the coffee table, the collection of puzzles Joan ordered. Now that he’s done being defensive, he can finally get a good look at them. He crooks a nervous finger at the puzzle boxes.
“For me?”
There’s a strain in his voice Joan doesn’t hear from him often. It doesn’t paint a pretty picture, one of broken toys and thrown out lovies, a child who’s never sure how long he’ll have the things he does. “Yeah. All yours.”
Sherlock doesn’t answer. It’s funny how even while regressed, he has his thoughtful pauses, how visibly the wheels in his mind turn.
Joan presses, but softly. “Do you like them?”
“We can play with them?” Sherlock asks. A pause, as he swallows back his trepidation. “Together?”
And with that, the final piece of evidence slots into place. Sherlock was a deprived child, but he was also an incredibly lonely one. He’s stuck with comfort items, things he holds close but doesn’t actually play with.
Maybe it’s not about the quality of the toy, but having someone to play with. Sherlock treasures his independence much less when he’s regressed, constantly on Joan’s coattails, keening for her company, attention, and affection.
“Of course, honeybee.” Joan wraps her arm around his shoulders, tugging him into a cuddle. He angles his body so he can curl up even closer. “You know how much I love to play with you.”
Clearly he doesn’t, if the way his ears burn with delight is any indication. He says no more, just buries his face against her neck.
“Why don’t we pick another puzzle we can work on after lunch?” Joan suggests. Another mess, another unfinished game, is just a part of having a child, she’s found. Sherlock’s headspace is far too young for them to keep working at the milk puzzle.
Sherlock hums. “’d like that, Joanie.”
And with a kiss to his brow, Joan considers the case of Sherlock and his toys officially closed.