"Egad!" (Elementary fanfic, rated PG), 2014 JWP Prompt #15
Title: Egad!
Author: gardnerhill
Fandom: Sherlock Holmes (Elementary - Joan’s Beez ‘verse)
Word Count: 1881
Rating: PG (NYC apian language)
Summary: SteamClydepunk. With bees. (I managed to make the Joan’s Beez AU even goofier.)
Author's Notes: For the 2014 July Watson’s Woes Prompt #15, brought to you by crack, crack, and oh so cracky: Cracktastic! It's that time again. Be as crazy as you want to be in today's entry, the crackier, the better.
Ms. Hudson had cleaned the entire flat and re-organized the tea-bags in the cupboard by province before she realized that the aquarium had been very quiet the entire morning. “Clyde?” she said. “Eíste koimisménoi?” [Are you asleep?]
A pause. “Óchi, Ms. Hudson, eímai lypiménos,” the tortoise responded. (Ms. Hudson’s Tortugese was rusty, but fortunately Clyde spoke good-enough Greek.) [No, I’m sad.]
That didn’t sound like a mood that could be lifted with a new shell-cosy. “Why are you sad, honey?” she asked, walking over to the aquarium where Clyde sat under his half-log shelter, chin on the gravel. She took up her mug and tipped some of her White Darjeeling into Clyde’s water dish. (In this household, the very sensible first rule for any emergency was Stick the Kettle On.) “Do you want to talk about it?”
Clyde took a sip and lifted his head a bit more. “Ms. Hudson, I want to help them! But I’m just a mascot. A pet.”
“They like you very much, dear,” Ms Hudson reassured the tortoise. “And they enjoy having so much life around them, like their bees.”
“The bees help!”
Ms Hudson smiled. The new species of bees Sherlock had named for Joan were swift, strong, intelligent, and foul-mouthed - New Yorkers through and through. The swarm of Euglassia watsonia had already saved Joan from one murder attempt by attacking the gunman … ah. Now she understood.
“You want to be part of the team, not just wear a pretty cosy to wake Joan up in the morning.”
“I want to help them!” Clyde dropped his head again. “But how? I’m slow, I can’t even get out of this tank. The bees fly, and they’re armed. The only time I move or go aloft is when one of them picks me up and carries me.”
“And you can’t ask them to pick you up and take you with them,” Ms. Hudson finished. “They’re smart, both of them - but neither one speaks Greek well enough to understand you.”
“And they need both their hands free.”
“Which means you need transport.” Ms. Hudson tapped her lips with one forefinger, thinking. “And the trouble with radio-controlled cars and airplanes big enough to carry you is the controls, too big and unwieldy. Hm. Let’s think about that one.”
“Okay.” But Clyde did sound a bit less unhappy. “Are you seeing Alfredo after work?”
“Now that would be telling,” Ms. Hudson said, mock-scoldingly, but with a smile on her face.
***
Fortunately the solution came about due to Clyde’s afternoon book-reading. After both enjoyed a Gamera film at lunchtime, Ms Hudson read the tortoise another chapter from a Roald Dahl book, and almost dropped it in her lap. “Seagulls!” she exclaimed.
“Um, centipedes actually,” said Clyde on the couch next to her, craning his neck to look at the Quentin Blake illustrations for James and the Giant Peach.
“No, no, it’s this chapter, here.” Ms. Hudson flipped the pages forward a few times, past the introductions of young James to all his insect friends. “Look, this is how they got the peach up in the air, away from the sharks.”
“Seagulls.” Clyde looked at the picture - an enormous peach wafting over the sea, towed by hundreds of seagulls tethered to the stem.
Clyde and Ms. Hudson turned their heads up toward the ceiling - toward the rooftop, and who lived there.
“We’ll have to see if they’re amenable,” Ms. Hudson said nervously.
“And there’s another problem,” Clyde said. “I don’t have a peach.”
“No, you don’t,” said Ms. Hudson, and stood to walk over to a bookcase and pull down the illustrated Jules Verne. “You’ll have to make one. But first things first.”
***
“You’re fuckin’ kidding me,” the One said. “Do my girls look like fuckin’ Central Park horses here? Is that what Shell-Boy is sayin’?”
Ms. Hudson translated the important part of the Euglassia watsonia queen’s reply into Greek. “[She’s feeling insulted. They’re not horses.]”
“[Tell them I want to help Joan, the way they do]!” Clyde pleaded.
Ms. Hudson went back and forth between the bees and the tortoise, with the natural diplomacy of someone who’d been a kept woman for a number of different men.
“What I want is enough bees to bring me along,” Clyde explained.
“Hey that sounds fun!” piped up one of the workers.
“Shaddap,” the One snapped. “I tell you what’s fun and what ain’t. You got a job to do, girly, and grubs to feed.”
“So, what about the drones, Your Solitude?” An older worker approached the queen with her antennae bent lower than those of her boss. “Most of ‘em are just sitting on their fat stingless asses sucking honey and waiting for your flight. This’ll give ‘em something to do.”
“Not me!” A drone happily displayed the pollen on his hind legs. “I’m one of the girls!”
The One lifted her antennae. “Not all the other drones are gay, sweetheart. You’re keeping plenty busy already.”
“So is there a possibility of having the drones in on this?” Ms Hudson took the opportunity. “They’re bigger, for one thing - we wouldn’t need as many of them. This gives them something they can do.”
The One’s antennae…lowered a fraction. “I’ll think about it.”
“Thank you, Your Solitude.” Ms. Hudson gathered Clyde and left the roof.
“Now that’s a self-made queen,” the One said admiringly. “Nurses! Clean up the cells, I’m gonna lay a bunch of drone eggs.”
“But you just said you’d -”
“Shaddap,” the One snapped to the worker, and was escorted back into the hive by her retinue.
***
Tap tap tap tap tap.
“Is that noise coming from Clyde’s aquarium?” Joan asked, pulling off her reading glasses and looking up from her file.
“He’s most likely moving pebbles around.” Sherlock didn’t look away from the maps and photographs he tacked up on the wall.
Saw saw saw saw saw.
Joan looked over at Clyde’s tank, and saw a puff of sawdust rising over it. “I heard that. Did you hear that?”
“A tough bit of lettuce stalk, most likely.” Sherlock rearranged two of the photos, and fastened a third upside-down.
A high-pitched whine.
“Is that what it sounds like?” Joan stood, incredulous.
“A very tiny power drill?” Sherlock finally looked over at the tank. “Eliminate the impossible.”
“But that IS impossible!” Joan walked over to look in the aquarium. “What is going…on.”
Sherlock joined his partner and looked in.
“When I eliminate the impossible,” Joan said - in between the ongoing tapping, sawing and drilling noises, “what that looks like is the prow of something like a boat sticking out of his log.”
“Not a boat, Watson,” Sherlock corrected. “No keel, broader and flatter than a boat prow. It would be safer to call this a gondola of some sort.”
“Oh yes, because THAT makes more sense than a turtle building a BOAT,” Joan snapped.
“I wonder why he’s doing that?” Sherlock reached in to touch the gondola and yanked his fingers back with an oath, just away from Clyde’s snapping mouth. “And it seems he doesn’t want to be disturbed. Ah well, I’m sure he’ll let us see it when it’s done.”
Joan walked back to the files she was reading, shaking her head. “Bees in the attic, and a Bob Vila fan in the turtle tank. This must be what going mad feels like.”
“An ex-surgeon who goes from sober companion to consulting detective may not have been the sanest knife in the drawer to begin with.” Sherlock faced his wall of photographs and dipped his hand in a Tupperware container of cow’s blood.
***
“It’s beautiful!” Ms Hudson turned the little craft around, smiling. “I couldn’t have built better when I got second place for my model of Old Ironsides.”
The oval platform, just big enough for its pilot, had a slightly-raised edge all around, dotted with neatly-drilled holes the size of a pencil lead.
Clyde wagged his head back and forth, pleased. “I still can’t believe you found that working tortoise-sized power drill.”
“It’s amazing what you can find at a dolls and miniatures show.” Ms Hudson produced the spools of black embroidery silk. “Shall we?”
It wound up taking two Gamera movies, four episodes of TMNT, and a Greek-subtitled copy of Turtle Diary (Clyde always cried when Ben Kingsley and Glenda Jackson set the sea turtles free in the ocean at the end), but both the housekeeper and the mascot managed to get all the harnesses tied on to the gondola and the nooses made.
Clyde tightened the last silk line. “And now?”
“And now,” said Ms. Hudson, “to see if the bees will even agree to this.”
***
“That was Detective Bell,” Sherlock called from the sitting room, accompanied by the jingle of handcuffs from which he was freeing himself. “He’d like to meet us in an hour at the crime scene.”
“Gives us enough time to eat lunch and walk over there, then.” Joan called back, tossing vegetables and dressing together. She had pulled two plates from the cupboard when she heard it. “Do you hear…?”
Sherlock stood up, unfastening the other cuff, at the approaching humming, thumping sound. “It’s coming from the stairwell to the roof.”
Joan walked in from the kitchen, just as the thing made its entrance.
A great cloud of bees hummed as they drifted into the sitting room, tethered by black strings to a gondola beneath. Clyde rested on the wooden platform as the entire assembly wafted majestically into the room’s air-space, approximately chest-high.
Joan opened her mouth then closed it again. Sherlock, likewise mute, only stared.
The ship slowed, hovered as the bees beat their wings. The gondola rotated approximately 90 degrees, and the flying machine hummed out through the kitchen door past Joan.
Sherlock joined her in the doorway to watch the flying machine negotiate kitchen space.
Joan blinked. “I saw a little leather aviator’s cap on Clyde’s head. With goggles.”
“So did I,” Holmes said immediately, and he saw Joan’s shoulders relax. “Ms. Hudson’s work, I have no doubt. As is the name on the ship’s prow.”
“A name.” Joan shook her head a little. “Of course there’s a name.”
The bee-propelled ship headed back toward them and stopped midair. The drones - big, beautifully-matched, all 500 of them - hovered, their wings stirring up a light breeze on the humans’ faces.
“See?” Sherlock raised a hand and pointed.
Joan looked at the white lettering on the front of the gondola. Χελώνα.
“Cheló̱na,” Sherlock pronounced. “’Tortoise.’”
Joan nodded like a senior being told there would be tapioca with dinner.
Clyde’s airship hummed over to the aquarium tank and touched down on the table.
“No,” Joan said. “This is what going mad feels like.”
Sherlock nodded. “Nonetheless, Watson, we have a commitment to our work. Flying tortoise or no flying tortoise, we promised to meet Detective Bell in 45 minutes.”
Clyde stamped his left foot twice. The bees rose in the air, carrying the ship upward again. The entire assembly flew to the front door and hovered.
“Ah.” Sherlock looked immensely relieved. “Now it’s clear.”
Joan turned and gave Sherlock a “you have GOT to be shitting me” stare.
Sherlock smiled serenely; the mystery was solved. “It appears, Watson, that we will be three to meet Detective Bell.”
Author: gardnerhill
Fandom: Sherlock Holmes (Elementary - Joan’s Beez ‘verse)
Word Count: 1881
Rating: PG (NYC apian language)
Summary: SteamClydepunk. With bees. (I managed to make the Joan’s Beez AU even goofier.)
Author's Notes: For the 2014 July Watson’s Woes Prompt #15, brought to you by crack, crack, and oh so cracky: Cracktastic! It's that time again. Be as crazy as you want to be in today's entry, the crackier, the better.
Ms. Hudson had cleaned the entire flat and re-organized the tea-bags in the cupboard by province before she realized that the aquarium had been very quiet the entire morning. “Clyde?” she said. “Eíste koimisménoi?” [Are you asleep?]
A pause. “Óchi, Ms. Hudson, eímai lypiménos,” the tortoise responded. (Ms. Hudson’s Tortugese was rusty, but fortunately Clyde spoke good-enough Greek.) [No, I’m sad.]
That didn’t sound like a mood that could be lifted with a new shell-cosy. “Why are you sad, honey?” she asked, walking over to the aquarium where Clyde sat under his half-log shelter, chin on the gravel. She took up her mug and tipped some of her White Darjeeling into Clyde’s water dish. (In this household, the very sensible first rule for any emergency was Stick the Kettle On.) “Do you want to talk about it?”
Clyde took a sip and lifted his head a bit more. “Ms. Hudson, I want to help them! But I’m just a mascot. A pet.”
“They like you very much, dear,” Ms Hudson reassured the tortoise. “And they enjoy having so much life around them, like their bees.”
“The bees help!”
Ms Hudson smiled. The new species of bees Sherlock had named for Joan were swift, strong, intelligent, and foul-mouthed - New Yorkers through and through. The swarm of Euglassia watsonia had already saved Joan from one murder attempt by attacking the gunman … ah. Now she understood.
“You want to be part of the team, not just wear a pretty cosy to wake Joan up in the morning.”
“I want to help them!” Clyde dropped his head again. “But how? I’m slow, I can’t even get out of this tank. The bees fly, and they’re armed. The only time I move or go aloft is when one of them picks me up and carries me.”
“And you can’t ask them to pick you up and take you with them,” Ms. Hudson finished. “They’re smart, both of them - but neither one speaks Greek well enough to understand you.”
“And they need both their hands free.”
“Which means you need transport.” Ms. Hudson tapped her lips with one forefinger, thinking. “And the trouble with radio-controlled cars and airplanes big enough to carry you is the controls, too big and unwieldy. Hm. Let’s think about that one.”
“Okay.” But Clyde did sound a bit less unhappy. “Are you seeing Alfredo after work?”
“Now that would be telling,” Ms. Hudson said, mock-scoldingly, but with a smile on her face.
***
Fortunately the solution came about due to Clyde’s afternoon book-reading. After both enjoyed a Gamera film at lunchtime, Ms Hudson read the tortoise another chapter from a Roald Dahl book, and almost dropped it in her lap. “Seagulls!” she exclaimed.
“Um, centipedes actually,” said Clyde on the couch next to her, craning his neck to look at the Quentin Blake illustrations for James and the Giant Peach.
“No, no, it’s this chapter, here.” Ms. Hudson flipped the pages forward a few times, past the introductions of young James to all his insect friends. “Look, this is how they got the peach up in the air, away from the sharks.”
“Seagulls.” Clyde looked at the picture - an enormous peach wafting over the sea, towed by hundreds of seagulls tethered to the stem.
Clyde and Ms. Hudson turned their heads up toward the ceiling - toward the rooftop, and who lived there.
“We’ll have to see if they’re amenable,” Ms. Hudson said nervously.
“And there’s another problem,” Clyde said. “I don’t have a peach.”
“No, you don’t,” said Ms. Hudson, and stood to walk over to a bookcase and pull down the illustrated Jules Verne. “You’ll have to make one. But first things first.”
***
“You’re fuckin’ kidding me,” the One said. “Do my girls look like fuckin’ Central Park horses here? Is that what Shell-Boy is sayin’?”
Ms. Hudson translated the important part of the Euglassia watsonia queen’s reply into Greek. “[She’s feeling insulted. They’re not horses.]”
“[Tell them I want to help Joan, the way they do]!” Clyde pleaded.
Ms. Hudson went back and forth between the bees and the tortoise, with the natural diplomacy of someone who’d been a kept woman for a number of different men.
“What I want is enough bees to bring me along,” Clyde explained.
“Hey that sounds fun!” piped up one of the workers.
“Shaddap,” the One snapped. “I tell you what’s fun and what ain’t. You got a job to do, girly, and grubs to feed.”
“So, what about the drones, Your Solitude?” An older worker approached the queen with her antennae bent lower than those of her boss. “Most of ‘em are just sitting on their fat stingless asses sucking honey and waiting for your flight. This’ll give ‘em something to do.”
“Not me!” A drone happily displayed the pollen on his hind legs. “I’m one of the girls!”
The One lifted her antennae. “Not all the other drones are gay, sweetheart. You’re keeping plenty busy already.”
“So is there a possibility of having the drones in on this?” Ms Hudson took the opportunity. “They’re bigger, for one thing - we wouldn’t need as many of them. This gives them something they can do.”
The One’s antennae…lowered a fraction. “I’ll think about it.”
“Thank you, Your Solitude.” Ms. Hudson gathered Clyde and left the roof.
“Now that’s a self-made queen,” the One said admiringly. “Nurses! Clean up the cells, I’m gonna lay a bunch of drone eggs.”
“But you just said you’d -”
“Shaddap,” the One snapped to the worker, and was escorted back into the hive by her retinue.
***
Tap tap tap tap tap.
“Is that noise coming from Clyde’s aquarium?” Joan asked, pulling off her reading glasses and looking up from her file.
“He’s most likely moving pebbles around.” Sherlock didn’t look away from the maps and photographs he tacked up on the wall.
Saw saw saw saw saw.
Joan looked over at Clyde’s tank, and saw a puff of sawdust rising over it. “I heard that. Did you hear that?”
“A tough bit of lettuce stalk, most likely.” Sherlock rearranged two of the photos, and fastened a third upside-down.
A high-pitched whine.
“Is that what it sounds like?” Joan stood, incredulous.
“A very tiny power drill?” Sherlock finally looked over at the tank. “Eliminate the impossible.”
“But that IS impossible!” Joan walked over to look in the aquarium. “What is going…on.”
Sherlock joined his partner and looked in.
“When I eliminate the impossible,” Joan said - in between the ongoing tapping, sawing and drilling noises, “what that looks like is the prow of something like a boat sticking out of his log.”
“Not a boat, Watson,” Sherlock corrected. “No keel, broader and flatter than a boat prow. It would be safer to call this a gondola of some sort.”
“Oh yes, because THAT makes more sense than a turtle building a BOAT,” Joan snapped.
“I wonder why he’s doing that?” Sherlock reached in to touch the gondola and yanked his fingers back with an oath, just away from Clyde’s snapping mouth. “And it seems he doesn’t want to be disturbed. Ah well, I’m sure he’ll let us see it when it’s done.”
Joan walked back to the files she was reading, shaking her head. “Bees in the attic, and a Bob Vila fan in the turtle tank. This must be what going mad feels like.”
“An ex-surgeon who goes from sober companion to consulting detective may not have been the sanest knife in the drawer to begin with.” Sherlock faced his wall of photographs and dipped his hand in a Tupperware container of cow’s blood.
***
“It’s beautiful!” Ms Hudson turned the little craft around, smiling. “I couldn’t have built better when I got second place for my model of Old Ironsides.”
The oval platform, just big enough for its pilot, had a slightly-raised edge all around, dotted with neatly-drilled holes the size of a pencil lead.
Clyde wagged his head back and forth, pleased. “I still can’t believe you found that working tortoise-sized power drill.”
“It’s amazing what you can find at a dolls and miniatures show.” Ms Hudson produced the spools of black embroidery silk. “Shall we?”
It wound up taking two Gamera movies, four episodes of TMNT, and a Greek-subtitled copy of Turtle Diary (Clyde always cried when Ben Kingsley and Glenda Jackson set the sea turtles free in the ocean at the end), but both the housekeeper and the mascot managed to get all the harnesses tied on to the gondola and the nooses made.
Clyde tightened the last silk line. “And now?”
“And now,” said Ms. Hudson, “to see if the bees will even agree to this.”
***
“That was Detective Bell,” Sherlock called from the sitting room, accompanied by the jingle of handcuffs from which he was freeing himself. “He’d like to meet us in an hour at the crime scene.”
“Gives us enough time to eat lunch and walk over there, then.” Joan called back, tossing vegetables and dressing together. She had pulled two plates from the cupboard when she heard it. “Do you hear…?”
Sherlock stood up, unfastening the other cuff, at the approaching humming, thumping sound. “It’s coming from the stairwell to the roof.”
Joan walked in from the kitchen, just as the thing made its entrance.
A great cloud of bees hummed as they drifted into the sitting room, tethered by black strings to a gondola beneath. Clyde rested on the wooden platform as the entire assembly wafted majestically into the room’s air-space, approximately chest-high.
Joan opened her mouth then closed it again. Sherlock, likewise mute, only stared.
The ship slowed, hovered as the bees beat their wings. The gondola rotated approximately 90 degrees, and the flying machine hummed out through the kitchen door past Joan.
Sherlock joined her in the doorway to watch the flying machine negotiate kitchen space.
Joan blinked. “I saw a little leather aviator’s cap on Clyde’s head. With goggles.”
“So did I,” Holmes said immediately, and he saw Joan’s shoulders relax. “Ms. Hudson’s work, I have no doubt. As is the name on the ship’s prow.”
“A name.” Joan shook her head a little. “Of course there’s a name.”
The bee-propelled ship headed back toward them and stopped midair. The drones - big, beautifully-matched, all 500 of them - hovered, their wings stirring up a light breeze on the humans’ faces.
“See?” Sherlock raised a hand and pointed.
Joan looked at the white lettering on the front of the gondola. Χελώνα.
“Cheló̱na,” Sherlock pronounced. “’Tortoise.’”
Joan nodded like a senior being told there would be tapioca with dinner.
Clyde’s airship hummed over to the aquarium tank and touched down on the table.
“No,” Joan said. “This is what going mad feels like.”
Sherlock nodded. “Nonetheless, Watson, we have a commitment to our work. Flying tortoise or no flying tortoise, we promised to meet Detective Bell in 45 minutes.”
Clyde stamped his left foot twice. The bees rose in the air, carrying the ship upward again. The entire assembly flew to the front door and hovered.
“Ah.” Sherlock looked immensely relieved. “Now it’s clear.”
Joan turned and gave Sherlock a “you have GOT to be shitting me” stare.
Sherlock smiled serenely; the mystery was solved. “It appears, Watson, that we will be three to meet Detective Bell.”