John's Other Boyfriend - Standalone (French 'verse)
Title: John's Other Boyfriend
Author: Pic Akai
Rating: PG
Fandom: Sherlock
Summary: John gets to know Greg's kids better during the summer, and they meet Sherlock for (possibly) the first time.
Word count: ~3,600
Disclaimer: I do not own any of the people, characters, situations etc in these works of fiction, except for the ones I have created. They are written for entertainment purposes and no infringement or specific comment on any person is intended. Status: Finished as a standalone.
Notes: This is part of what I have now dubbed the French 'verse, and a direct sequel to John Watson Knows About Parrots and Squirrels. You probably need to have read that fic to understand this fully.
"Sorry," John said as he entered the flat, spotting Greg and the kids on the floor immediately. "I got caught up."
"Sherlock?" Greg asked.
"Naturally," John said, and didn't bother to elaborate. He did when it was something particularly interesting, such as the time last week when Sherlock had managed to stack pretty much the entirety of 221B's furniture in front of both doors to the hall and then claimed it would take him at least two hours to shift it - and since John was still here, he might as well take a look at that sample of bacteria underneath the microscope and tell Sherlock what he thought about it - but other than that, he knew Greg didn't need the details.
It was useful being in a relationship with someone who knew only too well how bonkers Sherlock was. Greg tended to ignore most of Sherlock's possessiveness, knowing just how much easier it made things for everyone if John was there to be his live-in carer, but he stood up for himself on occasion when Sherlock was just being ridiculous and he felt like he needed to remind the man that John did actually have a boyfriend, and it wasn't Sherlock. Sherlock was still John's partner, in some sense of the word, but Greg was his boyfriend. And if it meant they had to use teenage terms for Sherlock to grasp the difference, so be it.
"Hello John," Amélie said, as John got down on the floor. "We are building a train track."
"I can see," John replied, scanning the pile of Brio which was starting to take some sort of shape, then leaning in to give Greg a kiss.
"Would you like to help us?"
"Well, why not, since I'm here," John said, and he started creating a figure of eight in a small bit of space.
Fifteen minutes later they had a track which ran around the sofa, under the coffee table and was beginning to encroach upon the kitchen. It was still under construction, however, as Louis had voiced a doubt about whether they would have enough track to join it back to the beginning again, and he and Amélie were currently debating whether to just try it and see (Amélie's idea) or to measure how long the gap was and how many pieces they had (Louis' idea).
Greg asked them if they wanted a drink, and then took their yeses as a cue for him and John to leave.
"That's a sign of great trust, you know," Greg said as he opened the fridge. John went for the plastic beakers in the cupboard. "They don't let just anyone play with their train set. Even the kid downstairs isn't allowed."
"Isn't that the one you said regularly has tantrums in the middle of the night?"
"Well, yeah," Greg admitted. "But they don't know that. And I've seen you get a bit shouty now and then, too." He smiled, wrapping his arms round John as John put the beakers on the table.
"Only ever at people who deserve it," John said.
"Sherlock."
"Yes."
They lingered in the kitchen for a few more minutes, John enjoying the relative peace and quiet, which was a bit ridiculous when here were two more people than at home and two of them were young children. He hadn't seen Greg in a few days, tied up in the end of a case with Sherlock which mostly meant keeping Dimmock informed about the laws they were breaking on their way to solving the crime, and then pacifying him when he panicked. It was a couple of weeks into Greg's summer with his kids though, so John had seen them a few times by now and they were getting comfortable with one another. It was good.
"Daddy!" Amélie shrieked suddenly. "Louis has the red engine and he won't give it to me!"
"Good while it lasted," Greg said, rolling his eyes and separating himself from John.
He headed into the living room with the two plastic cups, John following with glasses, in time to hear Louis muttering unconcernedly, "I had it first," as he pushed it round the track.
Five minutes after that both children had bored of the train set, and Amélie announced she needed to do her reading. Louis said immediately, "I need to too."
"Well, I'll read with Amélie first and then I'll read with you Louis, all right?" Greg said.
"I need to read now," Louis said, sounding anxious, and Greg had that look on his face which John understood meant he didn't know if Louis was actually fretting or if he was just playing on his dad's worries about him.
"You are not reading, daddy, you are listening," Amélie said as she went to the bookshelf to get her library book.
"Sorry," Greg said automatically, still focussed on Louis. "Look mate, you can wait ten minutes, can't you?"
Louis shook his head mournfully. "We might forget," he said. "Or if there is an accident and we have to leave the flat…"
Greg looked pained for a moment, and then suddenly his eyes fell on John. "You could read with John," he said. "How's that?"
Louis considered this, looking first at Greg then at John. John tried to look like he was very good at listening. He had been told by several patients he was good at that, but then most of them were elderly and they seemed to regard anyone who even acknowledged them as terribly kind, which was frankly quite depressing.
Slowly, as the adults held their breath and Amélie snuggled up to her dad on the sofa, Louis nodded.
Greg smiled in relief; John somewhat in trepidation. It was only listening to a kid read, but Louis was very exacting about some things. Not in the way Amélie was, bossy because she liked being bossy, but in the way where he worried if things weren't just as he expected them to be.
"Shall we go and read in your room?" John suggested to Louis, who was still stood in the middle of the living room. "Then you and Amélie won't disturb each other."
"All right," Louis said, and went to get his book. John headed for the bedroom and tried to remember the exact tone of voice Greg used when correcting Louis' pronunciation.
Louis' book was about a dog, and thankfully he read it well, with few mistakes. When they got to the end John praised him again. Children needed praise. If they didn't get it they were liable to turn out like Sherlock, and that wasn't something anyone needed any more of.
"Do you have a dog?" Louis asked in response.
"Not now," John told him. "But I did when I was a little boy. It was a German Shepherd and it was bigger than me for a long time. My sister called it Thumper."
"Like the rabbit in Bambi?"
"Yeah," John agreed, then said, surprised, "You've seen Bambi?"
"Daddy has a lot of Disney films," Louis said, opening the book again to look at the pictures. "Maman says it is because he is still a child but he says they are for us to watch."
John wondered where Greg had managed to hide a stash of Disney DVDs where he hadn't yet seen them, and then what else he might have hidden in this secret place. "Who do you think they're for?" he asked.
"I think they are for everybody," Louis said. John supposed that was probably true.
* * * * *
"Are you sure you don't mind?" Greg asked, again, even as John and the twins were heading out of the door. "I mean, I could ring their mum. Or even the woman downstairs-"
"Why do you think the woman downstairs would be more interested in looking after your kids than I am?" John challenged him, and Greg looked slightly awkward. "There is absolutely no need to ring their mum; I'm here already, I don't mind taking them out, and we're going to have fun, right?"
"Right," the twins said in unison.
"All right," Greg said, apparently finally decided. "Thanks, love." He kissed John goodbye. "I just can't believe it's happened now…"
John shrugged his shoulders, and ushered the kids down the stairs.
They were in their third week of staying with Greg, and things had up until then been going brilliantly. He hadn't even been called into work, and didn't seem to have suspected that this was because John had been threatening most of the officers at the Met, up to and including the DCI, reminding them that Lestrade bloody well deserved a good break with his kids and if he didn't get it, John could quite easily stop bothering to come to crime scenes with Sherlock for a while. The campaign of fear was working marvellously.
And then this morning, Amélie had woken both Greg and John up with an excited shout of, "It is raining inside!" and their plans for a duvet day - now that the Disney film secret was out - were shot.
So since Greg needed to stay in to wait for the plumber and the landlady, and to try to dry off as much of his belongings as possible, John had offered to take the kids out for the day, seeing as they weren't entirely sure the ceiling wasn't going to come down and there was no way the twins wanted to spend all day in their bedroom.
John held off on the inevitable for as long as he could. He took the kids out for breakfast first, since they hadn't really wanted to stick around any longer than it took to pack a few things for the day, and swore them to secrecy about the iced buns they had afterwards. He knew full well that it was pointless; Amélie was surprisingly tight-lipped when she wanted to be but Louis just couldn't remember what it was he wasn't supposed to share. Still, it was the principle of the matter, John thought.
They went to the library afterwards and changed their books. John had forgotten their library cards but the librarian said it didn't matter as they had books to return so they could just use the same account. He tried to steer them towards a couple of vaguely more difficult books, so as to stretch them, with an idea that maybe that's what you were supposed to do, but the kids weren't convinced and eventually he shrugged to himself and decided that if it wasn't good enough they could come again tomorrow. Hell, they were reading at five and that was much better than a lot of European countries, so they were ahead in that respect already.
"Read a big book to us?" Amélie begged even as she was tugging John by his sleeve to a little sofa in the corner, and Louis was carrying a huge version of Through My Window. John did as asked, then again, and refused a third time, claiming his voice was going.
"It isn't," Amélie said scornfully. "You sound fine."
"Well…" John considered his reply. "I just don't want to read it for a third time."
"All right," she said simply, and he marvelled for a second as the twins went off in search of the piles they'd left somewhere.
They went to the park after that, looked at the ducks and played a bit of hide and seek and then visited the play area, which was absolutely heaving and John found himself stationed at the one gate, trying to keep track of both of them at once and finding it impossible and hoping that they weren't tall enough yet to climb over the fence. Naturally, they were fine and didn't escape, and after about twenty minutes they came back to him together, looking slightly redder than they had earlier, and he wondered if he ought to have thought about suncream. Oops. Oh well, Greg hadn't mentioned it.
"We are tired," Amélie spoke for them both as they leaned one either side of him against the railings. "Can we go home?"
"I'm afraid the flat's not fixed yet," John said. "Your daddy said he'd let me know when it was all right to come home but he hasn't said so yet." Greg had in fact called him about ten minutes previously, just checking in, and said he didn't see it happening any time before evening. The plumber had arrived first but not the landlady, and he needed information which only the landlady had. So the plumber had gone, and then the landlady turned up, and after a game of cat and mouse finally the two of them were there together, with Greg trying not to knock their heads together as he sheltered in the kitchen, attempting to dry off magazines and soft toys.
"Well can we go to your home then?" Amélie said. "We need to rest."
John was hoping it wouldn't come to that, but he had known even at the beginning of the day that the hope was futile. He nodded resolutely, directed them to pick up their bags and then led them to the nearest Tube station, wondering whether it would make things better or worse if Sherlock knew they were coming in advance.
In the end, he didn't bother texting, so the first Sherlock knew was when John opened the door and called, "Sherlock?" He told the kids to put their things by the door as they did at Greg's and went in search of his flatmate.
Sherlock was in the kitchen, apparently nailing half of the flat's contents to the table. John spotted a book, a jumper and a toothbrush of his in a pile to Sherlock's left, and picked them up quickly. He didn't look too closely at what was already nailed down, figuring that he could shout at Sherlock just as easily once the kids were gone than he could right now.
"I've brought the kids back with me," he said. "Greg's got a problem at his so we're staying here for a bit."
"Which kids?" Sherlock asked, and lined a nail up carefully in the exact centre of a plate before starting to hammer at it ever-so-slowly.
John went to herd the twins in, then kept his hands on their shoulders a safe distance from the table. "Greg's kids," he answered. "Louis and Amélie. You've met them before, haven't you?"
"No," Sherlock said, sounding uninterested. "Or if I have I've deleted it. I shall need more nails."
"Get them yourself," John replied without thinking, and then, "You've not met them, in five years? Ever?" He looked between Amélie and Louis. "Do you two remember ever meeting Sherlock?"
"Are you Bloody Sherlock?" was Amélie's intrigued response.
That even got Sherlock to pause. "That's not my legal name, no," he said, looking at her. "I am Sherlock. The bloody, I should imagine, is a term of endearment."
"That's not what I'd imagine," John muttered.
"My maman talks about Bloody Sherlock," Amélie said. "And sometimes my daddy but not usually."
"Your mother is French. Lestrade is dreadfully predictable," Sherlock said, and turned back to his plate.
"Surely you knew she was French before? Well, no, not you, of course not. Hang on though, I'm not French."
"You are also not a woman, John."
"Well, thanks for clarifying that," John said, and decided to take the kids into the living room.
It was another hour before Sherlock got bored of nailing. John wished Mrs Hudson had been at home so she could have been the one to shout at him about the noise rather than John, but alas it was a Thursday, which meant she was at her pottery class.
Sherlock drifted into the living room like a bad-tempered ghost, his dressing gown trailing through the air behind him. He draped himself over John's armchair - John couldn't really complain as Louis was sat in Sherlock's, doing some colouring-by-numbers - and stared at the ceiling.
John was doing a puzzle with Amélie at the table, so he didn't notice that Louis' attention had shifted until Louis asked, "Why are you nailing things to the table?"
He was surprised, when he thought about it, that the question hadn't come up sooner. Maybe the kids had inherited Greg's ability to know when something was futile, along with his burning need to eventually have a go at it anyway.
"I am not," Sherlock said. "Did you by any chance mean to use the past tense?"
"Past tense," Amélie said. "Je suis allé, tu es allé, il est allé, elle est allé, nous sommes allés, vous êtes allés, ils sont allés, elles sont allées." She continued to look for puzzle pieces as she spoke, and John envied her accent.
"That is a past tense, yes," Sherlock said. "However, it is the imperfect Louis needed."
Amélie seemed not to be too interested in the imperfect tense, concentrating very hard on forming the face of what looked like a horribly disfigured cartoon character, but Louis looked thoughtful and then said, "Why were you nailing things to the table?"
Sherlock launched - quite literally, as he flung his feet to the floor - into a detailed explanation of something to do with physics and what seemed to be, from what John could understand, molecular biology, though he couldn't at all follow how biology tied in to nailing John's books to the kitchen table. Sherlock went on for about three minutes before he finished, with a hand wave, "But it's all immaterial now."
Amélie had finished the puzzle, and was staring at Sherlock curiously, but not as blankly as John might have thought. She gave it a couple of beats before she asked, "How old do you think I am?"
"Five," Sherlock said immediately. "There are approximately seventy different pieces of information I can use to make that deduction; shall I list them?"
"NO," John said firmly, making both the twins look at him in surprise. He turned to breaking the puzzle up to put it back in the box.
"Who do you think is older?" Louis asked. John was interested to hear Sherlock's response to that, as he realised he didn't actually know. It didn't matter much to adults when kids were twins but he supposed it mattered quite a lot to the kids themselves, like it had always mattered to Harry that she was two whole years older than John, and therefore practically an adult, from the age of about five or so.
"Your sister is," Sherlock said, sounding bored.
There was a moment's pause before Amélie laughed and said, "No! But everybody always thinks I am. I think I was but they got mixed up."
John had turned round in time to see Sherlock's head snap up, and he stared now at Amélie, his eyes narrowed. "You're the youngest?"
"I am seven minutes older," Louis said quietly.
"How many different pieces of information told you that, Sherlock?" John asked, pressing down a laugh like an almost physical bubble was rising in his chest.
"It's not important," Sherlock huffed, and then started when Louis demanded, "It is!"
John was surprised, and even Amélie was staring at her brother. Sherlock stared at Louis for a moment or two, and then said, "Yes, I see it now."
"What?" Louis said almost angrily.
"You are the eldest," Sherlock replied.
"Yes," said Louis, and then he went back to his colouring.
* * * * *
It was late when Greg came to pick them up; late enough that the kids had already dropped off on the sofa at Baker Street, slept through the car ride home and didn't stir when Greg changed them into their pyjamas. It wasn't until the following morning that he got to ask them how their day had been.
"It was good," Louis said simply, for once answering first because Amélie had a mouthful of toast and egg. "We went to the park, and we went to the library, and-"
"I have eight new books," Amélie interrupted him, "But Louis only has seven."
They went into a joint and disjointed retelling of the previous day, recounting all the important details like the name of the girl they made friends with under the slide and that John had a pocket full of paper clips (Greg suspected that was Sherlock's influence) and so on. He listened, half-asleep but just pleased they seemed to have had a good time until Amélie said, "And then we went to see John's other boyfriend, and-"
"Hang on," he said, choking on a piece of bacon as he did so. Amélie politely waited for him to cough this up and to drink some water, which was unusual for her. "John's what?"
"What?" she said.
"What did you just say?"
"I don't know." She shrugged. "Anyway, after the park we went to see John's other boyfriend, and-"
"John's other boyfriend?" Greg was aware he sounded a little hysterical, but he felt it was warranted. Adults assuming about John and Sherlock was one thing, but when his bloody kids picked up on it…!
"Yes," said Amélie. "And his name is not Bloody Sherlock, it is just Sherlock. Maman thinks it is Bloody Sherlock but he said it is not."
Greg was glad at that point that he'd already choked up his bacon, because he burst out laughing and couldn't stop even as tears rolled down his face.
Pic
This entry was originally posted at http://ficofpic.dreamwidth.org/49144.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
Author: Pic Akai
Rating: PG
Fandom: Sherlock
Summary: John gets to know Greg's kids better during the summer, and they meet Sherlock for (possibly) the first time.
Word count: ~3,600
Disclaimer: I do not own any of the people, characters, situations etc in these works of fiction, except for the ones I have created. They are written for entertainment purposes and no infringement or specific comment on any person is intended. Status: Finished as a standalone.
Notes: This is part of what I have now dubbed the French 'verse, and a direct sequel to John Watson Knows About Parrots and Squirrels. You probably need to have read that fic to understand this fully.
"Sorry," John said as he entered the flat, spotting Greg and the kids on the floor immediately. "I got caught up."
"Sherlock?" Greg asked.
"Naturally," John said, and didn't bother to elaborate. He did when it was something particularly interesting, such as the time last week when Sherlock had managed to stack pretty much the entirety of 221B's furniture in front of both doors to the hall and then claimed it would take him at least two hours to shift it - and since John was still here, he might as well take a look at that sample of bacteria underneath the microscope and tell Sherlock what he thought about it - but other than that, he knew Greg didn't need the details.
It was useful being in a relationship with someone who knew only too well how bonkers Sherlock was. Greg tended to ignore most of Sherlock's possessiveness, knowing just how much easier it made things for everyone if John was there to be his live-in carer, but he stood up for himself on occasion when Sherlock was just being ridiculous and he felt like he needed to remind the man that John did actually have a boyfriend, and it wasn't Sherlock. Sherlock was still John's partner, in some sense of the word, but Greg was his boyfriend. And if it meant they had to use teenage terms for Sherlock to grasp the difference, so be it.
"Hello John," Amélie said, as John got down on the floor. "We are building a train track."
"I can see," John replied, scanning the pile of Brio which was starting to take some sort of shape, then leaning in to give Greg a kiss.
"Would you like to help us?"
"Well, why not, since I'm here," John said, and he started creating a figure of eight in a small bit of space.
Fifteen minutes later they had a track which ran around the sofa, under the coffee table and was beginning to encroach upon the kitchen. It was still under construction, however, as Louis had voiced a doubt about whether they would have enough track to join it back to the beginning again, and he and Amélie were currently debating whether to just try it and see (Amélie's idea) or to measure how long the gap was and how many pieces they had (Louis' idea).
Greg asked them if they wanted a drink, and then took their yeses as a cue for him and John to leave.
"That's a sign of great trust, you know," Greg said as he opened the fridge. John went for the plastic beakers in the cupboard. "They don't let just anyone play with their train set. Even the kid downstairs isn't allowed."
"Isn't that the one you said regularly has tantrums in the middle of the night?"
"Well, yeah," Greg admitted. "But they don't know that. And I've seen you get a bit shouty now and then, too." He smiled, wrapping his arms round John as John put the beakers on the table.
"Only ever at people who deserve it," John said.
"Sherlock."
"Yes."
They lingered in the kitchen for a few more minutes, John enjoying the relative peace and quiet, which was a bit ridiculous when here were two more people than at home and two of them were young children. He hadn't seen Greg in a few days, tied up in the end of a case with Sherlock which mostly meant keeping Dimmock informed about the laws they were breaking on their way to solving the crime, and then pacifying him when he panicked. It was a couple of weeks into Greg's summer with his kids though, so John had seen them a few times by now and they were getting comfortable with one another. It was good.
"Daddy!" Amélie shrieked suddenly. "Louis has the red engine and he won't give it to me!"
"Good while it lasted," Greg said, rolling his eyes and separating himself from John.
He headed into the living room with the two plastic cups, John following with glasses, in time to hear Louis muttering unconcernedly, "I had it first," as he pushed it round the track.
Five minutes after that both children had bored of the train set, and Amélie announced she needed to do her reading. Louis said immediately, "I need to too."
"Well, I'll read with Amélie first and then I'll read with you Louis, all right?" Greg said.
"I need to read now," Louis said, sounding anxious, and Greg had that look on his face which John understood meant he didn't know if Louis was actually fretting or if he was just playing on his dad's worries about him.
"You are not reading, daddy, you are listening," Amélie said as she went to the bookshelf to get her library book.
"Sorry," Greg said automatically, still focussed on Louis. "Look mate, you can wait ten minutes, can't you?"
Louis shook his head mournfully. "We might forget," he said. "Or if there is an accident and we have to leave the flat…"
Greg looked pained for a moment, and then suddenly his eyes fell on John. "You could read with John," he said. "How's that?"
Louis considered this, looking first at Greg then at John. John tried to look like he was very good at listening. He had been told by several patients he was good at that, but then most of them were elderly and they seemed to regard anyone who even acknowledged them as terribly kind, which was frankly quite depressing.
Slowly, as the adults held their breath and Amélie snuggled up to her dad on the sofa, Louis nodded.
Greg smiled in relief; John somewhat in trepidation. It was only listening to a kid read, but Louis was very exacting about some things. Not in the way Amélie was, bossy because she liked being bossy, but in the way where he worried if things weren't just as he expected them to be.
"Shall we go and read in your room?" John suggested to Louis, who was still stood in the middle of the living room. "Then you and Amélie won't disturb each other."
"All right," Louis said, and went to get his book. John headed for the bedroom and tried to remember the exact tone of voice Greg used when correcting Louis' pronunciation.
Louis' book was about a dog, and thankfully he read it well, with few mistakes. When they got to the end John praised him again. Children needed praise. If they didn't get it they were liable to turn out like Sherlock, and that wasn't something anyone needed any more of.
"Do you have a dog?" Louis asked in response.
"Not now," John told him. "But I did when I was a little boy. It was a German Shepherd and it was bigger than me for a long time. My sister called it Thumper."
"Like the rabbit in Bambi?"
"Yeah," John agreed, then said, surprised, "You've seen Bambi?"
"Daddy has a lot of Disney films," Louis said, opening the book again to look at the pictures. "Maman says it is because he is still a child but he says they are for us to watch."
John wondered where Greg had managed to hide a stash of Disney DVDs where he hadn't yet seen them, and then what else he might have hidden in this secret place. "Who do you think they're for?" he asked.
"I think they are for everybody," Louis said. John supposed that was probably true.
* * * * *
"Are you sure you don't mind?" Greg asked, again, even as John and the twins were heading out of the door. "I mean, I could ring their mum. Or even the woman downstairs-"
"Why do you think the woman downstairs would be more interested in looking after your kids than I am?" John challenged him, and Greg looked slightly awkward. "There is absolutely no need to ring their mum; I'm here already, I don't mind taking them out, and we're going to have fun, right?"
"Right," the twins said in unison.
"All right," Greg said, apparently finally decided. "Thanks, love." He kissed John goodbye. "I just can't believe it's happened now…"
John shrugged his shoulders, and ushered the kids down the stairs.
They were in their third week of staying with Greg, and things had up until then been going brilliantly. He hadn't even been called into work, and didn't seem to have suspected that this was because John had been threatening most of the officers at the Met, up to and including the DCI, reminding them that Lestrade bloody well deserved a good break with his kids and if he didn't get it, John could quite easily stop bothering to come to crime scenes with Sherlock for a while. The campaign of fear was working marvellously.
And then this morning, Amélie had woken both Greg and John up with an excited shout of, "It is raining inside!" and their plans for a duvet day - now that the Disney film secret was out - were shot.
So since Greg needed to stay in to wait for the plumber and the landlady, and to try to dry off as much of his belongings as possible, John had offered to take the kids out for the day, seeing as they weren't entirely sure the ceiling wasn't going to come down and there was no way the twins wanted to spend all day in their bedroom.
John held off on the inevitable for as long as he could. He took the kids out for breakfast first, since they hadn't really wanted to stick around any longer than it took to pack a few things for the day, and swore them to secrecy about the iced buns they had afterwards. He knew full well that it was pointless; Amélie was surprisingly tight-lipped when she wanted to be but Louis just couldn't remember what it was he wasn't supposed to share. Still, it was the principle of the matter, John thought.
They went to the library afterwards and changed their books. John had forgotten their library cards but the librarian said it didn't matter as they had books to return so they could just use the same account. He tried to steer them towards a couple of vaguely more difficult books, so as to stretch them, with an idea that maybe that's what you were supposed to do, but the kids weren't convinced and eventually he shrugged to himself and decided that if it wasn't good enough they could come again tomorrow. Hell, they were reading at five and that was much better than a lot of European countries, so they were ahead in that respect already.
"Read a big book to us?" Amélie begged even as she was tugging John by his sleeve to a little sofa in the corner, and Louis was carrying a huge version of Through My Window. John did as asked, then again, and refused a third time, claiming his voice was going.
"It isn't," Amélie said scornfully. "You sound fine."
"Well…" John considered his reply. "I just don't want to read it for a third time."
"All right," she said simply, and he marvelled for a second as the twins went off in search of the piles they'd left somewhere.
They went to the park after that, looked at the ducks and played a bit of hide and seek and then visited the play area, which was absolutely heaving and John found himself stationed at the one gate, trying to keep track of both of them at once and finding it impossible and hoping that they weren't tall enough yet to climb over the fence. Naturally, they were fine and didn't escape, and after about twenty minutes they came back to him together, looking slightly redder than they had earlier, and he wondered if he ought to have thought about suncream. Oops. Oh well, Greg hadn't mentioned it.
"We are tired," Amélie spoke for them both as they leaned one either side of him against the railings. "Can we go home?"
"I'm afraid the flat's not fixed yet," John said. "Your daddy said he'd let me know when it was all right to come home but he hasn't said so yet." Greg had in fact called him about ten minutes previously, just checking in, and said he didn't see it happening any time before evening. The plumber had arrived first but not the landlady, and he needed information which only the landlady had. So the plumber had gone, and then the landlady turned up, and after a game of cat and mouse finally the two of them were there together, with Greg trying not to knock their heads together as he sheltered in the kitchen, attempting to dry off magazines and soft toys.
"Well can we go to your home then?" Amélie said. "We need to rest."
John was hoping it wouldn't come to that, but he had known even at the beginning of the day that the hope was futile. He nodded resolutely, directed them to pick up their bags and then led them to the nearest Tube station, wondering whether it would make things better or worse if Sherlock knew they were coming in advance.
In the end, he didn't bother texting, so the first Sherlock knew was when John opened the door and called, "Sherlock?" He told the kids to put their things by the door as they did at Greg's and went in search of his flatmate.
Sherlock was in the kitchen, apparently nailing half of the flat's contents to the table. John spotted a book, a jumper and a toothbrush of his in a pile to Sherlock's left, and picked them up quickly. He didn't look too closely at what was already nailed down, figuring that he could shout at Sherlock just as easily once the kids were gone than he could right now.
"I've brought the kids back with me," he said. "Greg's got a problem at his so we're staying here for a bit."
"Which kids?" Sherlock asked, and lined a nail up carefully in the exact centre of a plate before starting to hammer at it ever-so-slowly.
John went to herd the twins in, then kept his hands on their shoulders a safe distance from the table. "Greg's kids," he answered. "Louis and Amélie. You've met them before, haven't you?"
"No," Sherlock said, sounding uninterested. "Or if I have I've deleted it. I shall need more nails."
"Get them yourself," John replied without thinking, and then, "You've not met them, in five years? Ever?" He looked between Amélie and Louis. "Do you two remember ever meeting Sherlock?"
"Are you Bloody Sherlock?" was Amélie's intrigued response.
That even got Sherlock to pause. "That's not my legal name, no," he said, looking at her. "I am Sherlock. The bloody, I should imagine, is a term of endearment."
"That's not what I'd imagine," John muttered.
"My maman talks about Bloody Sherlock," Amélie said. "And sometimes my daddy but not usually."
"Your mother is French. Lestrade is dreadfully predictable," Sherlock said, and turned back to his plate.
"Surely you knew she was French before? Well, no, not you, of course not. Hang on though, I'm not French."
"You are also not a woman, John."
"Well, thanks for clarifying that," John said, and decided to take the kids into the living room.
It was another hour before Sherlock got bored of nailing. John wished Mrs Hudson had been at home so she could have been the one to shout at him about the noise rather than John, but alas it was a Thursday, which meant she was at her pottery class.
Sherlock drifted into the living room like a bad-tempered ghost, his dressing gown trailing through the air behind him. He draped himself over John's armchair - John couldn't really complain as Louis was sat in Sherlock's, doing some colouring-by-numbers - and stared at the ceiling.
John was doing a puzzle with Amélie at the table, so he didn't notice that Louis' attention had shifted until Louis asked, "Why are you nailing things to the table?"
He was surprised, when he thought about it, that the question hadn't come up sooner. Maybe the kids had inherited Greg's ability to know when something was futile, along with his burning need to eventually have a go at it anyway.
"I am not," Sherlock said. "Did you by any chance mean to use the past tense?"
"Past tense," Amélie said. "Je suis allé, tu es allé, il est allé, elle est allé, nous sommes allés, vous êtes allés, ils sont allés, elles sont allées." She continued to look for puzzle pieces as she spoke, and John envied her accent.
"That is a past tense, yes," Sherlock said. "However, it is the imperfect Louis needed."
Amélie seemed not to be too interested in the imperfect tense, concentrating very hard on forming the face of what looked like a horribly disfigured cartoon character, but Louis looked thoughtful and then said, "Why were you nailing things to the table?"
Sherlock launched - quite literally, as he flung his feet to the floor - into a detailed explanation of something to do with physics and what seemed to be, from what John could understand, molecular biology, though he couldn't at all follow how biology tied in to nailing John's books to the kitchen table. Sherlock went on for about three minutes before he finished, with a hand wave, "But it's all immaterial now."
Amélie had finished the puzzle, and was staring at Sherlock curiously, but not as blankly as John might have thought. She gave it a couple of beats before she asked, "How old do you think I am?"
"Five," Sherlock said immediately. "There are approximately seventy different pieces of information I can use to make that deduction; shall I list them?"
"NO," John said firmly, making both the twins look at him in surprise. He turned to breaking the puzzle up to put it back in the box.
"Who do you think is older?" Louis asked. John was interested to hear Sherlock's response to that, as he realised he didn't actually know. It didn't matter much to adults when kids were twins but he supposed it mattered quite a lot to the kids themselves, like it had always mattered to Harry that she was two whole years older than John, and therefore practically an adult, from the age of about five or so.
"Your sister is," Sherlock said, sounding bored.
There was a moment's pause before Amélie laughed and said, "No! But everybody always thinks I am. I think I was but they got mixed up."
John had turned round in time to see Sherlock's head snap up, and he stared now at Amélie, his eyes narrowed. "You're the youngest?"
"I am seven minutes older," Louis said quietly.
"How many different pieces of information told you that, Sherlock?" John asked, pressing down a laugh like an almost physical bubble was rising in his chest.
"It's not important," Sherlock huffed, and then started when Louis demanded, "It is!"
John was surprised, and even Amélie was staring at her brother. Sherlock stared at Louis for a moment or two, and then said, "Yes, I see it now."
"What?" Louis said almost angrily.
"You are the eldest," Sherlock replied.
"Yes," said Louis, and then he went back to his colouring.
* * * * *
It was late when Greg came to pick them up; late enough that the kids had already dropped off on the sofa at Baker Street, slept through the car ride home and didn't stir when Greg changed them into their pyjamas. It wasn't until the following morning that he got to ask them how their day had been.
"It was good," Louis said simply, for once answering first because Amélie had a mouthful of toast and egg. "We went to the park, and we went to the library, and-"
"I have eight new books," Amélie interrupted him, "But Louis only has seven."
They went into a joint and disjointed retelling of the previous day, recounting all the important details like the name of the girl they made friends with under the slide and that John had a pocket full of paper clips (Greg suspected that was Sherlock's influence) and so on. He listened, half-asleep but just pleased they seemed to have had a good time until Amélie said, "And then we went to see John's other boyfriend, and-"
"Hang on," he said, choking on a piece of bacon as he did so. Amélie politely waited for him to cough this up and to drink some water, which was unusual for her. "John's what?"
"What?" she said.
"What did you just say?"
"I don't know." She shrugged. "Anyway, after the park we went to see John's other boyfriend, and-"
"John's other boyfriend?" Greg was aware he sounded a little hysterical, but he felt it was warranted. Adults assuming about John and Sherlock was one thing, but when his bloody kids picked up on it…!
"Yes," said Amélie. "And his name is not Bloody Sherlock, it is just Sherlock. Maman thinks it is Bloody Sherlock but he said it is not."
Greg was glad at that point that he'd already choked up his bacon, because he burst out laughing and couldn't stop even as tears rolled down his face.
Pic
This entry was originally posted at http://ficofpic.dreamwidth.org/49144.html. Please comment there using OpenID.