fic: like a friend (rpf AU)
like a friend
rpf. “elementary, my dear -- ” “please do not finish that sentence.” “elementary, then.” a collection of disorganized moments between an investigator and her companion. eddie redmayne/felicity jones, elementary!AU. 2600 words.
notes:, el oh el, am I right??? written for goddesspharo's prompt over at the great old rpf comment ficathon! and her prompt was "Elementary AU, Felicity Jones as Sherlock, Eddie Redmayne as Watson, Romola Garai as Captain Gregson," and I apologize bc Romola is merely mentioned in this haha. spoilers (of the vague variety) for the series!
1.
“You don’t have to leave me, you know,” she says.
For the past week she has been eyeing the calendar over the sink like a specter in her house.
“Are you asking me to stay?”
Felicity considers the question same as she considers Eddie: thoughtfully, detached, a bit like a cat batting at an already felled mouse.
“I’m simply saying you don’t have to go,” she finally says.
But that’s getting ahead of the story.
2.
“This is my driver,” she tells Detective Garai, distracted by the police tape.
“His name is Eddie.”
3.
“You’ve seen bodies before,” Felicity says, dismissive of Eddie without even looking at him.
He still has his handkerchief raised to his mouth. At the first sight of the body, his eyes had watered near immediately and the taste of bile rose just as quickly. No, that’s not entirely true. It wasn’t the sight, grisly as it was, but rather the smell.
Scent: the sucker punch of all the senses. When he had first arrived in New York, during a period of feigned familial estrangement, he had passed through Grand Central Station and caught a whiff of the perfume his mother wore -- and until then he had believed only his mother to wear it, despite the logical conclusion of mass production and profit margins -- and his heart broke right there, in front of the clock, amidst the afternoon travelers and under the vaulted ceiling.
That’s the sort of anecdote he has learned (though has yet to fully understand the lesson) and will continue to learn that Felicity has no patience to suffer.
“That’s sentiment,” she had said when he broached the subject of her own mother, the purse strings in this particular operation.
(It is worth a mention, he supposes, that he has come to look at Felicity as an operation. It had been the first word that sprang to mind upon meeting her -- that this would be an operation. At first, he had assumed he meant it in a sense he had never used before, the way spies speak, but then realized the word they use is operative not operation. One afternoon, while Felicity pinged from one corner of the room to the other, muttering under her breath about ligature marks and Newton's apple and Shakespeare’s King Lear, he had quietly consulted the giant Oxford English Dictionary she allowed to collect dust next to the stubbornly dirty microwave. He looked up the word operate, saw its origin from the early 17th century, operat - ‘done by labor’ from the verb operari - ‘expend labor on’, from opus, oper - ‘work.’
What he thought he meant in that moment was that Felicity would be work. What he knew was that he was wrong, that when he said operation he meant the sort he had trained to understand and know: the blade cutting the body open, peeling back the skin, the bone, getting at the good stuff, the red stuff, the stuff that made a person a person. She was an operation, he was operating on her, with a blunter instrument than he was used to: himself, all of him, not just his hands, no sharp edge of artificial design).
In the penthouse overlooking Midtown, Eddie keeps the handkerchief at his mouth. The blood has congealed on the hardwood floor, black in the shadow cast by both their bodies, and he can still smell (can still taste) that sharp metallic tang, the stench of fresh meat.
“Not like this,” he says. Her eyes are huge when she considers him from beneath her fringe.
(“I didn’t know of your interest in linguistics,” Felicity had said suddenly from across the room. She had been wearing an old flannel shirt, mostly unbuttoned, the sleeves rolled up to her elbows. A pen cap hung from her mouth, there were dark circles under her eyes, and he had looked up from the massive dictionary balanced on the microwave.
“Surprises!” she had said, and she grinned, the pen cap biting into her thick bottom lip.
He felt a brief press of pity for Martin Guerro, their suspected laundromat killer).
4.
Felicity is very pretty and very girlish considering all that comes tied to her name: the investigator career, the rehab stint, the heroin addiction.
She dresses the way a schoolgirl during the height of finals might: academic, with her oxford shirts and blazers and peter pan collars, but there’s always that note of disarray to her -- the messy hair, the untied Converse sneakers, the ripped jeans, the ripped tights, the too short skirt.
None of it seems to hang right on her.
That is, until she opens her mouth.
5.
She smirks up at him, proud, it would seem, as much of herself as his own deduction.
“Elementary, my dear -- ”
“Please do not finish that sentence.”
She cocks her head. “Elementary, then.”
6.
The first time he meets her a heavily tattooed man is exiting her brownstone, pulling on his shirt as he goes.
The man sees Eddie but does not respond when Eddie nods in acknowledgement.
The first time he meets her, she is standing alone in front of eight different televisions tuned to different stations, clad in only a pair of loose cuffed boy’s jeans and a black strapless bra, her hair piled on top of her head, a hickey at her neck.
“You’re early,” she says without looking at him.
“I’m really not,” he says, his gaze lingering on the rack against the wall, the handcuffs still attached.
In the glow of the televisions, he thinks she looks triumphant.
7.
When he finally fucks her --
Her hips are lifting off the bed, chasing his hand or his mouth, whichever part of him she can get to press against her, where she’s hottest and wettest.
“Don’t let me come,” she gasps, her hands fisting his sheets, her entire body thrumming like a live wire.
He looks up at her and then bites the inside of her thigh. She twitches; he can see the red marks at her wrists from when she was bound just moments before.
“You tell me when,” she can barely get the words out, her face red, fringe matting to her damp forehead. “You tell me when I can come, fuck.”
He cradles her hips, likes the way they fit in his hands, likes the way that smart mouth of hers couldn’t say a sensible thing right now if she tried.
“Not yet,” he breathes against her.
“Not yet.”
8.
“You were a very good surgeon, weren’t you,” she asks him one night. No, she does not ask. She states it like fact, like every other fact she recites to him -- the number of delegates in attendance for the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the number of bullets in the typical magazine used in a AC-556, the number of weeks The Eagles’s The Long Run remained atop the charts in 1979, the number of known species of bees and the number she has stored above them.
“I was. Yes. I suppose.”
9.
When she is working, she is practically trilling, operating on a frequency too high for him to follow, vibrating with energy and purpose.
She drags him from the DMV to the Hudson to a subway station in Queens down to Romola’s precinct to a dog-fight ring in Chinatown to an artist’s studio in Chelsea. She never quits, tenacious in an entirely stubborn and sure-footed way.
She also does not sleep.
When she does crash, it is always at random, like her body has decided the time has come to shut down, and he’ll find her asleep at the kitchen table, in the torn leather armchair by the window, on the floor, spread across the rug, her body splayed out like the next body they'll find outlined in chalk. The one memorable occasion when she fell asleep in the attic, tucked between two ancient trunks, and Eddie had almost made the decision to assume the worst -- that she had relapsed, that she was somewhere with a needle in her arm, her big eyes glassy and unfamiliar.
He was wrong and he never told her of his suspicions. Instead he made her a cup of tea and lectured her about the benefits of a regular sleeping pattern.
“I think we both know I’m hardly ‘regular,’ Eddie. In fact, I’m quite extraordinary.” She didn’t say it smugly, but merely as a fact. “Why should my REM cycle be anything but?”
“You are absurd, is what you are.”
10.
“You’re very bright when you want to be, Eddie,” she says, with pride, he supposes, as they walk side-by-side down Ninth Avenue.
“Thanks. I think.”
She takes what he had said about arterial blood splatter and folds it into what had been her earlier monologue about the probable height of their straight-blade-wielding assassin. He listens, as well as he can ever listen to Felicity, at times craving a feedback delay to keep apace with the way her thoughts flit from one focus to the other -- like her beloved bees she keeps on the roof, hopping from one open flower to the next -- but he finds himself stuck on his name.
She says his name so often. She says his name like she is reminding the both of them that it’s him she’s talking to, that it’s him she wants to listen.
“Consider,” she is saying, “for example, were I to slit your throat, Eddie -- ”
11.
“What a pointless endeavor,” Felicity says, staring at her computer screen.
She has Instagram open. Of all the keys to a murder case, Eddie never in his wildest dreams would have guessed a college kid’s Instagram account.
What he doesn’t say to Felicity is that he can see the point in it, sort of. Sometimes you want to catalog your life. Sometimes you want to say -- look, I am real, I am a real person who does real things. Sometimes. This is the coffee shop where I ask them to put cinnamon in my coffee and they do. This is my dry cleaner’s. They charge me $5 for each day I am late to pick my clothes up, and I am late very, very often; it gets expensive. This is the market where I buy cheap wine for too much and this is the deli where I first tasted pastrami.
This is your house and this is where we have come to live together.
He can understand the desire to have all that on the record, official or otherwise.
Call it proof of life.
What he means is, he can understand the desire for her to know all that. About him.
But then, he supposes she already does.
12.
Eddie once knew a girl named Amanda and she liked some real bad things.
She blamed New York, she blamed him, blamed everyone but herself and the snake charmer’s rattle of a bottle of pills.
He knew her when she almost died and he knew her when she left New York.
It’s a cliche for a man to change his life because of a woman, and he knows this. He doesn’t think he changed because of her, not exclusively.
She liked some bad things and he did some bad things, good intentions not considered.
A body on the table, her body on the floor -- one lived, the other bled out, both under his own hand.
13.
She frightens him, but only once.
There is no risk of relapse, just murder. Just murder, he thinks, and it’s been a straight slope down with her, hasn’t it.
There is so much of her he has left to learn, so much broken and wanting (needing?) under her skin and beneath the cage of her bones, and he knows, he learned it, the very first lesson of being a sober companion, being anyone’s companion: you are not meant to fix them. You’re there to help them cope, to help them live.
He does not think Felicity lives. He thinks she collects -- facts, memories, people -- and he thinks she exacts revenge.
He does not know what happened in London. He does not know what brought her low.
What he does know is that a killer name M succeeded where Eddie could not and he cracks her in half and lays her open and bare.
She frightens him. And it’s not her quiet rage, not her near clinical approach to murder.
It’s that his first impulse was to help her, not from herself, but to kill.
14.
“You’re attracted to me.” She says it with authority, the same tone with which the night before she had asked him if he was interested in cricket (he seemed like the type, she had said) or confessed that she suspected there were rats in the attic.
He starts, the dish he’s washing at the sink forgotten, left under the running water.
“There’s nothing shameful in that. You’re a man, and much of history and even more of literature has been built on the premise of a man wanting a woman he shouldn’t.”
She takes a large bite of her BLT, a slice of tomato hanging out of her mouth.
“For the record, I find you attractive as well. You are very tall and very freckled. I am curious as to how freckled. And you have very capable hands.”
He has known her for two weeks.
15.
When he finally fucks her, it is on his terms as much as her own.
When he fucks her, it is after her mother has quit sending him checks and after Felicity has discovered the truth:
The truth that he stayed on his own terms. That yes, he was worried, and yes, that worry led him to lie, and yes, maybe there was more to it than worry, no, he will not name it, and of course Felicity discovered the truth. The most shocking part of it all was merely how long it took.
“I’ve reached the conclusion,” she had said, her hands flat on the kitchen table, her voice rapid as an excited heartbeat, quiet and low, “that I do not care to doubt you, and as a result I have left a window open for gaffes on first your part and then my own for not . . . noticing sooner. I have no desire to question you at every turn, and therefore, as a friend or as . . . whatever I am to you -- obviously no longer a client, my mother has made that perfectly clear -- I not only request, but I, I demand the truth.”
“I stayed because I thought you might need me,” he said.
She looked at him, a slight pout to her mouth, her posture still severe.
“Do you think I still need you now?” There was another question implicit in that one, buried, like those Russian nesting dolls she inexplicably kept on the bookshelf next to several volumes on string theory. The question unsaid was: Do you still need to believe I need you?
He leaned forward. “I can’t answer that,” he said. “But I think I would. Like to stay, that is.”
She leaned forward, too. Her face was close to his and his eyes were drawn to the freckles strewn across the bridge of her nose.
“Is that better for you? Wanting as opposed to needing?”
Her voice was husky, almost broken, and any other woman he might have kissed her then. Kissed her as an answer, because that was the one thing Felicity never seemed to understand: sometimes action trumped as explanation. Sometimes there were no words, not even in that fucking brick of a dictionary next to the marinara-stained microwave.
Instead he pressed his lips together and did not answer the question. Not yet.
“No more lies,” he said.
And then he stayed.
fin.
rpf. “elementary, my dear -- ” “please do not finish that sentence.” “elementary, then.” a collection of disorganized moments between an investigator and her companion. eddie redmayne/felicity jones, elementary!AU. 2600 words.
notes:, el oh el, am I right??? written for goddesspharo's prompt over at the great old rpf comment ficathon! and her prompt was "Elementary AU, Felicity Jones as Sherlock, Eddie Redmayne as Watson, Romola Garai as Captain Gregson," and I apologize bc Romola is merely mentioned in this haha. spoilers (of the vague variety) for the series!
1.
“You don’t have to leave me, you know,” she says.
For the past week she has been eyeing the calendar over the sink like a specter in her house.
“Are you asking me to stay?”
Felicity considers the question same as she considers Eddie: thoughtfully, detached, a bit like a cat batting at an already felled mouse.
“I’m simply saying you don’t have to go,” she finally says.
But that’s getting ahead of the story.
2.
“This is my driver,” she tells Detective Garai, distracted by the police tape.
“His name is Eddie.”
3.
“You’ve seen bodies before,” Felicity says, dismissive of Eddie without even looking at him.
He still has his handkerchief raised to his mouth. At the first sight of the body, his eyes had watered near immediately and the taste of bile rose just as quickly. No, that’s not entirely true. It wasn’t the sight, grisly as it was, but rather the smell.
Scent: the sucker punch of all the senses. When he had first arrived in New York, during a period of feigned familial estrangement, he had passed through Grand Central Station and caught a whiff of the perfume his mother wore -- and until then he had believed only his mother to wear it, despite the logical conclusion of mass production and profit margins -- and his heart broke right there, in front of the clock, amidst the afternoon travelers and under the vaulted ceiling.
That’s the sort of anecdote he has learned (though has yet to fully understand the lesson) and will continue to learn that Felicity has no patience to suffer.
“That’s sentiment,” she had said when he broached the subject of her own mother, the purse strings in this particular operation.
(It is worth a mention, he supposes, that he has come to look at Felicity as an operation. It had been the first word that sprang to mind upon meeting her -- that this would be an operation. At first, he had assumed he meant it in a sense he had never used before, the way spies speak, but then realized the word they use is operative not operation. One afternoon, while Felicity pinged from one corner of the room to the other, muttering under her breath about ligature marks and Newton's apple and Shakespeare’s King Lear, he had quietly consulted the giant Oxford English Dictionary she allowed to collect dust next to the stubbornly dirty microwave. He looked up the word operate, saw its origin from the early 17th century, operat - ‘done by labor’ from the verb operari - ‘expend labor on’, from opus, oper - ‘work.’
What he thought he meant in that moment was that Felicity would be work. What he knew was that he was wrong, that when he said operation he meant the sort he had trained to understand and know: the blade cutting the body open, peeling back the skin, the bone, getting at the good stuff, the red stuff, the stuff that made a person a person. She was an operation, he was operating on her, with a blunter instrument than he was used to: himself, all of him, not just his hands, no sharp edge of artificial design).
In the penthouse overlooking Midtown, Eddie keeps the handkerchief at his mouth. The blood has congealed on the hardwood floor, black in the shadow cast by both their bodies, and he can still smell (can still taste) that sharp metallic tang, the stench of fresh meat.
“Not like this,” he says. Her eyes are huge when she considers him from beneath her fringe.
(“I didn’t know of your interest in linguistics,” Felicity had said suddenly from across the room. She had been wearing an old flannel shirt, mostly unbuttoned, the sleeves rolled up to her elbows. A pen cap hung from her mouth, there were dark circles under her eyes, and he had looked up from the massive dictionary balanced on the microwave.
“Surprises!” she had said, and she grinned, the pen cap biting into her thick bottom lip.
He felt a brief press of pity for Martin Guerro, their suspected laundromat killer).
4.
Felicity is very pretty and very girlish considering all that comes tied to her name: the investigator career, the rehab stint, the heroin addiction.
She dresses the way a schoolgirl during the height of finals might: academic, with her oxford shirts and blazers and peter pan collars, but there’s always that note of disarray to her -- the messy hair, the untied Converse sneakers, the ripped jeans, the ripped tights, the too short skirt.
None of it seems to hang right on her.
That is, until she opens her mouth.
5.
She smirks up at him, proud, it would seem, as much of herself as his own deduction.
“Elementary, my dear -- ”
“Please do not finish that sentence.”
She cocks her head. “Elementary, then.”
6.
The first time he meets her a heavily tattooed man is exiting her brownstone, pulling on his shirt as he goes.
The man sees Eddie but does not respond when Eddie nods in acknowledgement.
The first time he meets her, she is standing alone in front of eight different televisions tuned to different stations, clad in only a pair of loose cuffed boy’s jeans and a black strapless bra, her hair piled on top of her head, a hickey at her neck.
“You’re early,” she says without looking at him.
“I’m really not,” he says, his gaze lingering on the rack against the wall, the handcuffs still attached.
In the glow of the televisions, he thinks she looks triumphant.
7.
When he finally fucks her --
Her hips are lifting off the bed, chasing his hand or his mouth, whichever part of him she can get to press against her, where she’s hottest and wettest.
“Don’t let me come,” she gasps, her hands fisting his sheets, her entire body thrumming like a live wire.
He looks up at her and then bites the inside of her thigh. She twitches; he can see the red marks at her wrists from when she was bound just moments before.
“You tell me when,” she can barely get the words out, her face red, fringe matting to her damp forehead. “You tell me when I can come, fuck.”
He cradles her hips, likes the way they fit in his hands, likes the way that smart mouth of hers couldn’t say a sensible thing right now if she tried.
“Not yet,” he breathes against her.
“Not yet.”
8.
“You were a very good surgeon, weren’t you,” she asks him one night. No, she does not ask. She states it like fact, like every other fact she recites to him -- the number of delegates in attendance for the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the number of bullets in the typical magazine used in a AC-556, the number of weeks The Eagles’s The Long Run remained atop the charts in 1979, the number of known species of bees and the number she has stored above them.
“I was. Yes. I suppose.”
9.
When she is working, she is practically trilling, operating on a frequency too high for him to follow, vibrating with energy and purpose.
She drags him from the DMV to the Hudson to a subway station in Queens down to Romola’s precinct to a dog-fight ring in Chinatown to an artist’s studio in Chelsea. She never quits, tenacious in an entirely stubborn and sure-footed way.
She also does not sleep.
When she does crash, it is always at random, like her body has decided the time has come to shut down, and he’ll find her asleep at the kitchen table, in the torn leather armchair by the window, on the floor, spread across the rug, her body splayed out like the next body they'll find outlined in chalk. The one memorable occasion when she fell asleep in the attic, tucked between two ancient trunks, and Eddie had almost made the decision to assume the worst -- that she had relapsed, that she was somewhere with a needle in her arm, her big eyes glassy and unfamiliar.
He was wrong and he never told her of his suspicions. Instead he made her a cup of tea and lectured her about the benefits of a regular sleeping pattern.
“I think we both know I’m hardly ‘regular,’ Eddie. In fact, I’m quite extraordinary.” She didn’t say it smugly, but merely as a fact. “Why should my REM cycle be anything but?”
“You are absurd, is what you are.”
10.
“You’re very bright when you want to be, Eddie,” she says, with pride, he supposes, as they walk side-by-side down Ninth Avenue.
“Thanks. I think.”
She takes what he had said about arterial blood splatter and folds it into what had been her earlier monologue about the probable height of their straight-blade-wielding assassin. He listens, as well as he can ever listen to Felicity, at times craving a feedback delay to keep apace with the way her thoughts flit from one focus to the other -- like her beloved bees she keeps on the roof, hopping from one open flower to the next -- but he finds himself stuck on his name.
She says his name so often. She says his name like she is reminding the both of them that it’s him she’s talking to, that it’s him she wants to listen.
“Consider,” she is saying, “for example, were I to slit your throat, Eddie -- ”
11.
“What a pointless endeavor,” Felicity says, staring at her computer screen.
She has Instagram open. Of all the keys to a murder case, Eddie never in his wildest dreams would have guessed a college kid’s Instagram account.
What he doesn’t say to Felicity is that he can see the point in it, sort of. Sometimes you want to catalog your life. Sometimes you want to say -- look, I am real, I am a real person who does real things. Sometimes. This is the coffee shop where I ask them to put cinnamon in my coffee and they do. This is my dry cleaner’s. They charge me $5 for each day I am late to pick my clothes up, and I am late very, very often; it gets expensive. This is the market where I buy cheap wine for too much and this is the deli where I first tasted pastrami.
This is your house and this is where we have come to live together.
He can understand the desire to have all that on the record, official or otherwise.
Call it proof of life.
What he means is, he can understand the desire for her to know all that. About him.
But then, he supposes she already does.
12.
Eddie once knew a girl named Amanda and she liked some real bad things.
She blamed New York, she blamed him, blamed everyone but herself and the snake charmer’s rattle of a bottle of pills.
He knew her when she almost died and he knew her when she left New York.
It’s a cliche for a man to change his life because of a woman, and he knows this. He doesn’t think he changed because of her, not exclusively.
She liked some bad things and he did some bad things, good intentions not considered.
A body on the table, her body on the floor -- one lived, the other bled out, both under his own hand.
13.
She frightens him, but only once.
There is no risk of relapse, just murder. Just murder, he thinks, and it’s been a straight slope down with her, hasn’t it.
There is so much of her he has left to learn, so much broken and wanting (needing?) under her skin and beneath the cage of her bones, and he knows, he learned it, the very first lesson of being a sober companion, being anyone’s companion: you are not meant to fix them. You’re there to help them cope, to help them live.
He does not think Felicity lives. He thinks she collects -- facts, memories, people -- and he thinks she exacts revenge.
He does not know what happened in London. He does not know what brought her low.
What he does know is that a killer name M succeeded where Eddie could not and he cracks her in half and lays her open and bare.
She frightens him. And it’s not her quiet rage, not her near clinical approach to murder.
It’s that his first impulse was to help her, not from herself, but to kill.
14.
“You’re attracted to me.” She says it with authority, the same tone with which the night before she had asked him if he was interested in cricket (he seemed like the type, she had said) or confessed that she suspected there were rats in the attic.
He starts, the dish he’s washing at the sink forgotten, left under the running water.
“There’s nothing shameful in that. You’re a man, and much of history and even more of literature has been built on the premise of a man wanting a woman he shouldn’t.”
She takes a large bite of her BLT, a slice of tomato hanging out of her mouth.
“For the record, I find you attractive as well. You are very tall and very freckled. I am curious as to how freckled. And you have very capable hands.”
He has known her for two weeks.
15.
When he finally fucks her, it is on his terms as much as her own.
When he fucks her, it is after her mother has quit sending him checks and after Felicity has discovered the truth:
The truth that he stayed on his own terms. That yes, he was worried, and yes, that worry led him to lie, and yes, maybe there was more to it than worry, no, he will not name it, and of course Felicity discovered the truth. The most shocking part of it all was merely how long it took.
“I’ve reached the conclusion,” she had said, her hands flat on the kitchen table, her voice rapid as an excited heartbeat, quiet and low, “that I do not care to doubt you, and as a result I have left a window open for gaffes on first your part and then my own for not . . . noticing sooner. I have no desire to question you at every turn, and therefore, as a friend or as . . . whatever I am to you -- obviously no longer a client, my mother has made that perfectly clear -- I not only request, but I, I demand the truth.”
“I stayed because I thought you might need me,” he said.
She looked at him, a slight pout to her mouth, her posture still severe.
“Do you think I still need you now?” There was another question implicit in that one, buried, like those Russian nesting dolls she inexplicably kept on the bookshelf next to several volumes on string theory. The question unsaid was: Do you still need to believe I need you?
He leaned forward. “I can’t answer that,” he said. “But I think I would. Like to stay, that is.”
She leaned forward, too. Her face was close to his and his eyes were drawn to the freckles strewn across the bridge of her nose.
“Is that better for you? Wanting as opposed to needing?”
Her voice was husky, almost broken, and any other woman he might have kissed her then. Kissed her as an answer, because that was the one thing Felicity never seemed to understand: sometimes action trumped as explanation. Sometimes there were no words, not even in that fucking brick of a dictionary next to the marinara-stained microwave.
Instead he pressed his lips together and did not answer the question. Not yet.
“No more lies,” he said.
And then he stayed.
fin.