Chapter Text
Once I thought that love was something I could never do
Never knew that I could feel this much
The way you look, the way you laugh
The way you love with all you have
All you gotta do is smile at me and down I go
And baby, it’s no mystery why I surrender
The way you move when you walk by
There’s ain’t nothing ‘bout you that don’t do something for me
- Nothing ‘Bout You by Brooks & Dunn (the Taylor Swift cover)
Before the - Fall, as he called it in his head; his first Death; before his funeral and the bereavement his friends had gone through and the grief he’d experienced when he left his smoky, thriving, thrilling city - before that, all the flats around 221b had been occupied by assassins. Not the kind of people you’d want to ask for sugar. Though he wouldn’t have minded. Maybe it would have been interesting to see what kinds of sugar they had. In fact - missed opportunity. He should have. Then he could have written up an experiment on them.
But, too late now.
Since the Fall, the flats had been sold. Rented out again. Swapped tenants dozens of times, perhaps. He knows only cursory things about them now, things that anyone could deduce just by looking at the curtains and windows and noting the times when the lights switched off at night. He’s been busy, since his return to London. No time for trivialities.
Yet now, since Mary Watson shot him, he has had nothing but trivialities to think about.
Sherlock Holmes sighed. Loudly. It echoed through the quiet space of the lounge, reverberating through his chest and leaving a twang of pain. Healing was boring. Healing without morphine was tedious. John had thrown himself into an avalanche of doctor’s work, as though there was any chance under the revolving sun that that could be more interesting than solving cases with Sherlock. And he might have found a peace with Mary - Mary Watson, who was not Mary Watson at all, yet still Mary Watson, and that was so entirely confusing, he would have to sort it all out in his Mind Palace at some point - but he didn’t want her in his flat, there without John, when he was attempting to recover from her gunshot wound.
So that left him with nothing to do but ruminate on the neighbours. For God’s sake, he’d be watching videos of kittens on Youtube next.
Even Mrs Hudson had gone out. The building was quiet. He could hear a thrum of engines, people, outside. All familiar noises, nothing out of the ordinary, no shriek of distress or echo of a gun or anything interesting. And even if there was, he wouldn’t be able to investigate satisfactorily.
He heaved himself up, hands braced on the arms of his chair. Grimaced. His vision turned black and spotty for a moment before it cleared. He retied his robe, then walked over to the window, peering through the netted curtains.
Cloudy. The sun still managed to be bright behind its sheet of silver, and the pavement glistened. People were walking; Saturday shoppers, intent on phones and people and purchases and mundanity. A taxi drew to a stop and an elderly man slid out. Sherlock’s gaze whipped to him, to the faint resemblance he bore with Magnussen. But no. Someone else.
He was not disappointed. John would tell him not to be. He wasn’t in any fit state for a confrontation with the oily peacock who held secrets over Mary’s head. But he was.
That was when he spotted the paint-can, large and unwieldy, being carried across the road by a person - female, still young, wearing a woollen hat. He tilted his head. Why would someone carry paint in the street?
The girl turned left. Sherlock shifted, the flimsy curtain swaying lightly with the movement, and watched as she came to a sudden stop at the grey door of 233 Baker Street, raising her knee to balance the can.
Interesting.
****
“Hello,” he began, putting on his most charming smile when the door finally opened. He’d left his scarf in his flat and undone the two top buttons of his shirt. For some reason, women - and men - tended to find him more appealing like that. He hadn’t anticipated the cold gusts that would chill his collarbone and make his barely-healed wound tingle.
Not to mention the clamminess on his forehead and palms, just from descending - descending! - the stairs. Years of drug use, smoking, and ‘terrible’ diets, as Mrs Hudson had said, and yet it was Mary Watson’s gunshot that ruined his health. The irony.
He smiled a bit more and proffered his hand. “I’m-”
“Oh, come on,” the girl said, cutting him off. “Put the shiners away, for the love of God. It’s way too early for that sort of thing and I don’t have sunglasses.”
Sherlock blinked. Then blinked again. The smile had gone away of its own accord, but his hand was still extended. The girl reached out and grasped it, shook it firmly. Her hand was warm.
“Sherlock Holmes,” she said, dropping his hand and evaluating him. “Want to come in? Otherwise I’ll just start poisoning the whole of London.”
“The paint.” He stepped inside. “You started already?”
“Already?” she echoed. The door clicked shut and Sherlock looked around. “Damn, are you a stalker? Or a vampire? You could be either, being that pale and broody-faced.”
233a had its own front door. That door opened into this room. The main room.
Sofa. Second-hand, came with the lease. A TV, mostly unused. A stack of DVDS - all previously watched. Coffee-mug rings on the table. Fond of cushions. Dust-sheets over everything. Is that a bookshelf? Covered, so no clue as to what books she reads. Probably fiction. Possibly romances. Paint-cans - plural. She already had two. Brushes. Rollers. Samples on the wall there. A clock used to hang there. She’s taken it down. Masking tape along the skirting-boards. She’s done this before. Experience decorating, possibly due to a family business. Father? Uncle? Grandfather?
Kitchenette. Neat, organised. Practical. Extremely practical. One cup and an abandoned spoon on the counter.
Hallway there leads to the bathroom. And bedroom. Not much intel.
Sherlock turned, looking at her.
Younger than me by a few years. Hard to judge a woman’s age accurately these days. No cosmetics. No perfume. Shabby, old clothes used for decorating. Friendly. Likes baking. Amused. Amused by what? By me? Natural hair colour. Exercises often. Works as a….a…
Doesn’t work currently.
Recently moved in. Fond of pop music. Bad jokes. Used to wear a ring on her little finger but doesn’t anymore. Wears earrings. Had a nose-stud but it closed over.
“Grandfather or grandmother?”
“Sorry?”
“Who gave you the ring that you have taken off in case you get paint on it. Wise precaution. Though you seem to know what you’re doing.”
She looked down, rubbing her little finger. “Grandad. It was my special little inheritance thing, kind of? Long story. Hey, since you’re here, I might as well ask.” She flourished both her arms at the wall she was painting. “Opinions?”
The original had been a dowdy beige wall. Sherlock narrowed his eyes at it. Old, faded, possibly had been that shade for longer than he’d been alive. This new tenant was going for a boldly modern shade. A light, airy, leafy green.
He closed his eyes and pictured the entire room with green walls. He had to admit, it would look nice. Matched the tones of her wooden table and shelves.
“Placid,” he said, and opened his eyes again.
The corner of her mouth ticked up. “Huh.”
“Paint the skirting-boards and ceiling-edges white.”
“I’m planning on it. And I want that wall there, with the fireplace, to be, like, this deep, dark, shocking green.”
“A feature wall.”
“Yeah, that’s it.”
Sherlock looked at her again. She turned, walking back to her painting station - a tub, an abandoned roller, her phone, paused halfway through a song he doubted he’d recognise. The light from the window - unnetted, unconcealed, anyone could look in - streamed on her face.
There was paint splattered across her face and the backs of her hands. Her hair was coiled into a messy plait, half-flattened and half-unruly from the removal of her hat, the ends of her braid also flecked with paint. That same smile curved her mouth, her cheeks, sparkled in her eyes as she watched him back.
For the first time since his return to Baker Street, Sherlock was intrigued.
“It’s usually polite to introduce yourself to your guests. All you’ve done so far is prove that you know me.”
“Oh, sure. Howdy, neighbour,” she tapped an imaginary hat-brim, “I’m Jess. Jessica Norton. Your girl-next-door neighbour for the past two months, though it’s not like you’ve noticed me until I started hauling paint-cans around.”
“Jessica Norton,” he repeated, tasting the words curiously. It was a good name. It fitted. Like John Watson, or Molly Hooper.
“Jess.”
“You dislike being called Jessica?” He couldn’t relate. Janine had tried to call him ‘Sherl’, and he’d loathed it. Mycroft hated being called nicknames too.
“It sounds starchy.”
“Starchy?”
“Like pasta or something. Something with loads of carbs that just gives you indigestion.” The smile was back, wider. She had the hints of a dimple. “But don’t call me Jessie, either. My nan called me that. It’s hard enough for people to take me seriously without having a nickname like Jessie.”
“It’s hard to take you seriously when you have green freckles,” he said dryly.
He expected her to lift her hand. Touch her face. She didn’t.
Oh, she was interesting.
“You’re interesting.” He didn’t give her a chance to respond, in case she decided to say something trite that would diminish her interestingness. “You clearly know who I am, but how much, or where you have gotten that knowledge from, remains to be seen. You are young, and yet your family is not wealthy. Why the sudden break in your career? You were doing well as a…let’s see, what were you? Something to do with construction. Building. Interior designer? No, you’re too methodical. Architect, was it? Successful, very, but now you’re on hiatus. You don’t seem heartbroken - either for romantic reasons or family ones. You’re satisfied with your work. Why the pause? Why spend down all your substantial savings on an extended ‘holiday’? You would rather paint a flat yourself than have people in to do it. That suggests capability, and it is to some extent, but the truth is that you’re a control freak. You don’t trust other people to have the same amount of dedication and care about your belongings and personal space that you do. You don’t make friends easily - that’s obvious by how scarce your crockery is - despite your evident friendliness. Trust issues? Or something else? You pretend you don’t have anything to hide, Jessica Norton. You’re pretending to be ordinary. But you do, and you’re not. And that,” Sherlock finished with a great exhale, ignoring the sharp stabs of pain in his chest, “makes you the most interesting person I’ve met in three weeks.”
A long moment. He inhaled, paint and turpentine and a vanquished, muted whiff of floral floor-cleaner.
“Well.” Jessica Norton’s eyes were sparkling. “I’m not offering you any kind of beverage. There’s no way you need more caffeine in your system.”
*
Fifteen minutes later he was on the sofa, a bunch of photo frames piled beside him, the decorating sheet growing hot beneath his Belstaff, which he’d refused to take off. The pains had lessened somewhat. Jessica Norton had gone back to her painting. There were more splodges in her hair from when she’d carelessly flicked her brush in emphasis.
“Giving up my career was the easy choice, actually. Maybe it’s not temporary. Who knows?” She put the roller down and stretched out her arms, rotating her wrists. Sherlock tapped his fingers on his knee, watched her curiously. “I needed some time to just…think. Think about who I wanted to be, maybe? I’m not sure. It was necessary, though, and I’m glad. I’ve never really…settled down in one place for too long. And look at me now.” She gestured to the flat around her. “I’m nesting.”
He snorted. “You’re too young for a midlife crisis.”
“Hey, you said it, not me, Mr Hat Detective.”
“You read the tabloids.”
“Yeah, ‘course. Though I knew who you were when I moved in. My landlord warned me.”
“Did he put the rent higher because of the novelty, or the risk?”
“You could blow up the whole street just like-” She clicked her fingers. “I considered taking out life insurance.”
Sherlock tilted his head. She rubbed her hands on her waist, then turned to him.
“Anyway, what’s the deal with it? Why do I have the great consulting detective on my sofa right now?”
“If you’ve read the tabloids then you know, obviously, that I was shot.”
She nodded, her mischief cooling into a sombre expression. “Yeah.”
“This is my recovery stage.” He waved his hand at himself. “Bored. It’s boring. Boring. But I promised John I wouldn’t take any cases.” And what would be the point? I don’t have anyone to solve them with. Not even Molly, now.
“So…” Jess pushed back a piece of hair. One half of the wall behind her was ancient and beige, the other gleaming an elfish green. “Are you looking for friends?”
No. He wasn’t. He had enough friends. And those friends, two of the closest ones, Mary and John, were at odds with each other, and he was loyal to both. He didn’t need more friends to care about. Alone protected him. Being here was just a diversion to his day, so that he wasn’t sitting in his chair at Baker Street, itching for nicotine or something worse, completely alo-
“-Because I seriously don’t need you stringing me along like you did Janine Hawkins. Trust me, I’d get way better revenge than she did.”
His eyes opened wide. “What?” Then, “How did you know it was a ruse?”
She grinned. “It was obvious, Mr Genius. You might be a detective, but I’m…”
He watched her, this woman with her paint-splattered jeans and lopsided grin and wickedly humorous eyes, watched this unknown quantity, effortlessly, in real-time, insert herself into the space in his Mind-Palace that had been empty, alongside John and Mary and Molly and Mrs Hudson and Greg and Mycroft, a mental image overlaid on the real her, both versions smiling the same sharp, brilliant smiles.
“I’m interesting.”
****
(One. Not that it was known that it would be ‘one’, at the time.) She walked quietly. Very quietly. He had turned around one day, a week after their first meeting, and she had been there, leaning against the doorframe of 221b’s kitchen. He hadn’t heard her leave the bathroom. He noticed it, then. The way she walked, no matter what shoes or socks she wore. The same way, adapted for each style of footwear, a method that rendered her utterly silent. Her clothes rarely rustled. Her arms never brushed her sides.
Another thing that made her interesting.
****
Then one became two.
Sherlock had been there for when she finished painting and started to clear up. A banjo and drums and some not-too-terrible singing echoed from her phone’s tinny speaker as she folded up dust-sheets. He sat on her sofa, in the spot he had simply come to own, and watched, like he always did. These days he had tea - decaffeinated. She laboured under a delusion that he didn’t need any more caffeine in his system. It never slowed down his speech or made his deductions any less brilliant.
Jess was arranging picture frames, hanging them on the walls, brushing her fingertips over the paint. She’d done a good job, decent enough that Mrs Hudson, who she had invited around with Sherlock for dinner one night, had asked her to paint her own bedroom. “Scarlet,” Mrs Hudson had said, “or crimson. Something bright, you know, rich and exciting. To remember the good old days.”
Jess had been washing out in her cup in the sink. Sherlock recalled the way she’d turned, her eyes seeking out his as she shot him an incredulous, amused, horrified glance. He’d winked over Mrs Hudson’s head.
She wasn’t pretty. Jess, that was, not Mrs Hudson. Not femininely attractive in a way that Sherlock had had shoved down his throat for most of his formative years. She rarely wore cosmetics, wasn’t fussed about her appearance. Yet there was something. Something about her that made her captivating to watch; the way she moved, efficiently, gracefully, knowing where every part of her body was and how far away it was from anything else. Sherlock couldn’t put his finger on what it was, exactly. Why did he want to look at her? He had never wanted to study a person’s face, their movements, the way their mouth moved or their eyebrows lifted or the unconscious movements of hands and eyes, for no reason.
And yet here he was. It was infuriating. And interesting.
Jess, oblivious to his dilemmas, reached the bookcase. “Voila!” she exclaimed, whipping off the sheet. “How I have missed you, my old, dearest friends!”
Sherlock tilted his head. It was a big bookcase, stretching almost to the ceiling, with deep shelves. Dark wood, covered in knots and whorls. Old, slightly warped with age and pressure. The bottom shelves were bare. The middle shelves were covered in brightly-coloured spines; the fictions he had expected. More of them than he’d anticipated, though. She liked to read.
The top shelves…
He stood abruptly. The movement didn’t cause as much pain as it had three weeks ago, only sent a couple of stabbing sensations through his torso and behind his eyes.
“There’s late-return fees,” Jess was saying. He reached the bookcase, close enough to smell old wood and Jess’s typical peppermint shampoo.
Along the top two shelves were an assorted mass of books. Architectural; that was to be expected.
“Why do you have so many books on human psychology?” He looked at her.
Jess looked back, chewing her lip. “I…I like to study people, I guess.”
“You go to cafés and study people as a pastime.”
He had seen her, on several occasions, both in Speedy’s and in a Caffe Nero down the road, simply sitting on a stool alone, watching the street through the window, stirring a drink idly. He had joined her once. They’d sat people-watching for almost an hour. She’d smiled at his deductions, but not interacted, until he decided to make her laugh. Which had been something of a challenge. In the end, she snorted once and laughed, properly laughed, twice.
“That’s the emotions, the practical bit. This is, like…” He followed her downcast gaze, to her socked, fidgeting toes. “The cold, hard, logical, theoretical side? I don’t know. It interests me.”
“Architecture. Psychology. There are similarities.”
“Building complex structures?”
Sherlock smirked, dipping his voice. “And knowing how to unbuild them.”
Jess blinked up at him, unfiltered shock in her eyes. “That’s kind of scary.”
“High-functioning sociopath, don’t forget.”
****
Two became three, in a rather unexpected manner.
It was amazing how quickly an acquaintance could spring up between two people in the space of four weeks and three days. Asides from Mrs Hudson, Sherlock had done his best to keep Jess away from his other circle of ‘friends’. It wasn’t particularly hard. John was still overworking himself (he hadn’t managed to lose the weight he’d gained, which was mostly due to his new habit of eating sugar for lunch. And he’d given up the cycling). Mary was dealing with her pregnancy and her estranged husband. Lestrade was busy. So was Molly.
Mycroft was irrelevant.
With nothing to do but focus on healing and wait for Christmas Day, Sherlock had encroached upon his newfound neighbour’s hospitality. When Jess didn’t tell him to get out, or a less polite variant, he kept coming back. Partly curiosity - when would she throw him out? Why didn’t she? - and partly because she was still interesting, even when she wasn’t carrying paint-cans across the road.
He had told her very little, next to nothing, about Mary and John and the state of affairs of everything, but he had told her about Magnussen one evening. There had been a quiet glee in the back of his mind, a smugness, in unionising with her over their shared loathing of the man. Watching her use several expletives as she suggested utterly impractical ways to eradicate him had been satisfying. Very satisfying.
That was why he barely paused to throw his coat on before descending the stairs - not quite at a gallop, but faster than a trot - and bounding out into the street. He pushed past a few pedestrians and mounted the single step up to her door. Knocked.
When there was no immediate answer he rolled his eyes, reached in his pocket. Was it not - no, there it was. His trusty lockpicks. He inserted them. It was a disturbingly easy lock to pick. Within seconds he had opened the door, without a single pedestrian so much as asking him if he was a burglar or not.
“Jess.” The door clicked shut behind him, trapping him in an atmosphere of cloying Yankee candle, and he looked up to meet Jess’s extremely annoyed gaze.
She was curled up on the sofa, wrapped in a sheet in a way that would have made it impossible for her to extricate herself speedily if the need had arose. Balanced on her knees was a sketchpad, and in her hand was a pencil.
He shook away the sudden curiosity to see what she was drawing. He already knew she sketched; both professionally, as an ex-architect, and for leisure.
“I knocked,” he said curtly.
“Doors are locked for a reason, Sherlock,” she threw back, unamused.
“You should get a better lock if you cared about security. A bolt, a chain. Lasers.” He smirked.
She didn’t smirk back. “Yeah, shouldn’t I? It’d keep out the pesky neighbours that, biblically, I’m supposed to love.”
A strange sensation stabbed his gut. Side-effects of the herbal tea Mrs Hudson had insisted he take to relieve his pain, perhaps. “Anyway! I told you about Magnussen and his place of residence, Appledore-”
She lowered her eyes and started to sketch again.
Sherlock cut himself off, dumbfounded. “Jess-”
“Sherlock,” she mimicked.
“This is Magnussen I’m talking about. What I’m about to tell you, the theory I’ve got, is far more important than your-”
“You just want attention while you get to grandstand.” He couldn’t see if Jess rolled her eyes or not, but he could hear it. “I’ve met a lot of men like that. But I didn’t open my door to you, I didn’t let you in, and I’m not lavishing attention on you. I’m busy.”
Sherlock gaped at the top of her head. “It’s Magnussen,” he said again, mildly betrayed. Hadn’t she hated him just the way that Sherlock did? “It’s Appledore.” He would try again. “Somewhere in Appledore is a place where he keeps all his secrets, all the things he holds above people’s heads.” She was still sketching. “But where? It can’t be anywhere that people know about it, after all, unless he has secrets to blackmail them about too. Of course he does. Still! For a chance to end him, many people would risk the blackmail. So-”
Her pencil rasped against the page viciously.
Sherlock lost his patience. In two steps he had gotten to the sofa, leaned over the back, and snatched her pencil.
She gaped at him, furious. He glared back.
“Stop paying attention to the sketch! This is important and-” He hesitated. Vulnerability, especially if it seemed unintentional and regretted afterwards, would soften her. “John won’t listen to me.”
She didn’t soften. “Give me back my goddamn pencil!”
He retreated a step. “You can have it back when I’m finished.” For God’s sake, was that petulance in his voice? Oh well. He widened his eyes at her, pushed out his lip, tried to appeal to the side of her that liked small, fluffy, ‘sqoochy’ things. “Please.”
She was unwrapping the blanket from her. It fell away with surprising ease. Standing. Looking at him. “Give that back.”
“No.”
She stepped closer, her gaze locked on his. It was a bleak day outside, and she didn’t have a lamp on. Her eyes were darker, glinting. For a moment, she reminded him of Irene Adler. The comparison, the glimpse of her collarbone in the same instance as her baggy shirt adjusted, made his pulse quicken.
“Learn, some, boundaries,” she said, her voice soft. “Give my pencil back.”
“No.” He’d stopped caring about Magnussen, at this point. There was something far more interesting, and like usual - the new usual - it was her. What would she do now? This energy, her energy of anger and unfriendliness, made her unrecognisable.
Very interesting.
She reached for his fist, and he shot his arm up into the air. There was no overcoming the physical advantage of his height. She wasn’t small, but she was too small to get the pencil out of his fist, even if she jumped. She’d have to climb him, like a monkey up a tree.
His pulse quickened even more, another sharp stab through his gut in the same instant.
For a moment, neither of them moved.
He didn’t see the arm coming. It was an arm, then an elbow, then a leg and something else. He fought back, instinctively, lashing out. Don’t hurt her, it’s only Jess, don’t hurt her. But it wasn’t just Jess. There was a hand on his throat for a flash of a second and he recoiled, and a hand on his back and fuck he heard voices in Serbian and the sour stench of male sweat and then there was a warm legging-clad calf between his knees and a dented cushion met his face.
He lay sprawled on the sofa, face-first, gasping. Both his hands were open. The pencil was gone.
“What,” he demanded, sitting bolt upright, his heart pounding, “what the fuck, Jess?”
She stood in front of the sofa, gripping onto her pencil, a backdrop of dark green wall behind her. There was worry in her eyes, written all over her face; fear and worry and concern. He tried to control his breathing. She couldn’t have known. She hadn’t meant to…
To what? Scare you? For God’s sake, Sherlock, Mycroft’s voice taunted him.
He readjusted his expression. Jess smiled, tentatively. “Cute but…deadly.” Her words were half a question.
Sherlock looked at her. “No,” he said at last, flatly. “More than deadly.”
He stood up. “That was a martial arts technique. Not just one. Several.”
“Mm.”
“Is there anything you can’t do?” It was supposed to sound more sarcastic. But the scars on his back were still tingling, at complete odds with the light green sanctuary around him.
Jess hesitated, looking around as she thought. “Well,” she said at last, her voice still sheepish, “I can’t…I guess I can’t seduce people.”
He burst out laughing.
****
The fourth time, it didn’t take Sherlock by surprise.
He knew Jess had a strong sense of smell. Despite her habit of cloistering herself up in her flat with unbearably strong stenches - paint, candles, marinading curry - she could pick out individual scents like a bloodhound. One rainy Sunday, he had invited her over, blindfolded her with his scarf, and made her identify as many different things as he could. She had got all of them correct, even the stale, half-eaten chocolate digestive he had found down the back of the sofa. And that one had been identified at half a metre’s distance.
It was another thing that made her unusual, interesting. Especially since she had what she dubbed a “photographic memory, but with a sense of smell”.
“You could be useful on cases,” Sherlock had said when he’d taken off the blindfold.
She’d grinned. “Can’t imagine what John would title that case on his blog. Sherlock And The Sniffer-Human?”
He had observed, too, Jess’s uncanny attuning to her surroundings. Unlike almost every other person he’d met, she actually used her senses. Taste, touch, hearing, vision, scent - she relied on them heavily. It made it impossible to sneak up on her, though he had done his best once or twice.
But this still managed to take him aback.
Her raincoat was glistening with rain even though she had only walked a few metres in the downpour. She was taking it off as she came through the door and he looked up and over at her, head propped on his fist, already smiling gleefully at the way he planned to win this game of Operation - and then she stopped and frowned at him.
“Oh no you didn’t.”
“Good afternoon to you, too, Miss Norton. Thank you, I am doing well. That is a very fetching shade of blue shirt you have. It enhances your jawline. Mrs Hudson won’t be bringing up tea until three-thirty so I do hope you’re not too dehydrated,” he rattled off, as fast as he could.
She threw her coat onto the sofa and walked over, arms crossed. “You’re meant to be getting better.”
“I am better. They took the bullet out, the wound’s closed over, I haven’t flatlined in nearly two months! I call that progress.”
“Stop being an idiot.” She was by his chair now. He craned his head back against the headrest. “And stop putting shit in your system.”
He opened his mouth, then shut it. She was reaching for his arm. Her hair was loose, falling forward. He could see the displeased tilt to her lips, the slant of her eyes, through tendrils of obscuring hair.
Her fingertips were cold but her palm was warm. She pulled back the left sleeve of his robe, fingernails grazing his wrist, his pulse, as she undid his shirt button. It accelerated.
She pulled back his shirtsleeve and sighed at the two flesh-coloured nicotine patches on his skin.
“You don’t need them to think. So why?”
“I do need to think.” Christmas was a month away. A month was too soon, and too far away, all at once. He needed to be prepared for every eventuality. Magnussen could not win, not this time.
“Not right now. We’re about to play boardgames.”
“Multi-tasking, Norton, or haven’t you heard of that?”
“I have, actually.” Her fingers, still lightly gripping his arm, suddenly tightened. Before he could protest, her other hand shot down and plucked the patches off, one after the other.
“Bloody hell, Jess!”
“Rip it off like a plaster.”
He scowled at her. “That hurt.”
“Well, I’m not kissing it better.”
His scowl turned into a smirk. “But since you’ve mentioned it-”
She buttoned up his sleeve, let his robe’s sleeve fall, then patted his hand consolingly. His fingers twitched. “Now that I’ve deprived you of your secret weapon, let’s play.”
He watched balefully as she went into the kitchen, binned the patches, washed her hands. Rain lashed against the windows as she switched the tap off with a little click!
“It’s still dripping.”
“Yes.”
“I thought Mrs Hudson had someone in to fix it?”
“I told him not to. I’m doing an experiment.”
Jess rolled her eyes, flapping her hands to dry them.
Sherlock narrowed his eyes.
“How did you know?”
“What?” She looked caught off-guard by his curt tone.
“How did you know.”
She sat down in John’s chair, reached behind her for the woollen blanket he kept folded there now, because she liked to wrap herself up in what she dubbed ‘cosy burritos’. “I mean…” She scrunched up her nose.
Sherlock sighed. “The nicotine patches. You knew immediately. How.”
She crinkled her entire face, wrinkling her nose.
Sherlock looked at her impatiently. “Don’t play the fool, Jess.”
This time it was a scrunch of genuine outrage. “I’m not. You are, doofus.” She tapped her nose. When he looked at her blankly, she rolled her eyes again. “I smelt it.”
Sherlock stared at her. “You smelt it,” he repeated flatly.
“Yeah. The…the nicotine, the scent, I recognised it immediately.”
“From over there.”
“...Yeah.”
They stared at each other. Jess’s lips twitched, her dimple appearing momentarily as she fought back a smile.
Finally, Sherlock raised a conceding eyebrow. “You’re talented. You would be useful on some of my cases.” For a moment he wanted to tell her how he’d identified his shooter - ultimately, Mary - through perfume. How much more faster could Jess have done it, he wondered? Would there have been other complexities, other smaller details, that she could instantly have recognised as belonging to Mary?
“That’d be an easy way to solve my midlife crisis,” Jess replied, her smile wide and unchecked now. “You’d better pay me.”
“Payment is only for full-time assistants. John was only ever part-time.”
She tilted her head. “Do you have a vacancy for a full-time assistant?”
It was uncanny, how much she resembled Janine in that moment. Except she was not Janine. She was Jess. If Sherlock had been anyone else, he would have found Janine interesting. But he wasn’t anyone else, and he hadn’t found Janine interesting, beyond what he needed from her.
But he had no ulterior motives, not when it came to Jess. And yet she was still interesting, still unfathomable and unpredictable and still making him curious, after all these weeks.
What would happen after Christmas? When John and Mary - hopefully - reconciled - when Mary was safe - when things were back to normal, when he was healed, when he and John were solving cases and saving London…where would this, this domesticity and board-games and other-life he had uncovered with a new friend, where would that go?
“Sherlock?”
Sherlock looked away, regathering his thoughts. “No,” he said, his voice suddenly sharp. “No vacancies.”
Jess studied him for a moment. “Okay.” Her voice was quiet.
“That’s alright. I wasn’t looking for another job yet.”