chaetos
FANDOM: Sherlock BBC
RATING: PG-13? Maybe? For swearing?
PAIRING: Fem!John/Fem!Sherlock
WORD COUNT: 1,174
DISCLAIMER: Nothing is mine, as always.
Part of the 'Hydrophilia' series of drabbles.
Everything they do, all of their firsts, involve water.
Jane is eating a biscuit when she first hears the clatter in the bathroom. She slowly lowers the shortbread back onto the coffee table, next to her morning paper and mug of tea, muscles tensed for several long seconds. After all, knowing Sherlock, assassins from the Knights Templar might have squeezed in through the window and the detective would be fighting them off with tiny razor blades. There are no sounds of furious battle, though, and Jane picks her biscuit up again. Hopefully Sherlock wasn’t messing with the plumbing. She was not washing at Mrs Turner’s again: she felt horrible intruding on Alice and Rebecca’s honeymoon bliss. And shower sex.
She is just about to bite into it when she hears Sherlock’s unmistakable “Oh, bugger it!” from the bathroom.
Sherlock’s voice is strange, Jane muses as she mourns the loss of her comfortable sugary morning. Low, bitingly upper-class, but with a smoker’s rasp that renders it very different to Mytrice’s glassy tones. And it carries these little remnants of hiding in the East End away from her sister’s eyes, the ‘wanker’s, the ‘blimey’s, the ‘bollocking fuck’s. Jane never thought Sherlock, with her oh-so-expensive coat and Pimlico accent, would swear quite as much, and quite as well, as she did.
Jane levers herself up with the crappy NHS-issue cane, before propping it up against an armrest. It’s getting up that sends that burning ache through her knee, not walking around. She crosses to the bathroom, and raps smartly on the stained wood.
“Sherlock? Everything alright in there?”
“Yes!” Sherlock replies hurriedly. There’s a pause and then a hissed expletive and several clangs of metal on floor tiles.
Jane sighs, a bit of amusement colouring her exasperation. “Sherlock, let me in, before you break something important, like a wall.”
There’s no verbal response, but Jane hears the scrape of the bolt moving back, and the door falling forward forces Jane to take a few steps back. Sherlock walks briskly back to whatever she was doing in there, in what Jane would call embarrassment in anybody else, but in Sherlock the hurry is just sensible conservation of available leisure time. Jane follows her in, not bothering to shut the door, noting the drops of blood on the floor.
Her brow crinkles in a frown. “Let me see it,” she says firmly, and Sherlock sticks a bloody hand in her general direction without taking her eyes from the mirror.
“Scissors,” she states, anticipating Jane’s question. “Haircut,” she continues, anticipating the next. Jane used to find this process of hers slightly jarring, but she’s now so used to it that speaking to normal people feels almost cumbersome. Sometimes she wonders if that’s how Sherlock feels all the time.
Jane roots around in the cupboard above Sherlock’s head, standing on her tip-toes to reach the first aid box, but her scrabbling only knocks the bloody thing further back and out of reach. Jane huffs in irritation and bumps Sherlock aside with her hip to step closer to the cupboard. Sherlock yelps indignantly as Jane’s hand closes on the green plastic handle.
“I could have cut my ear off,” she grumbles. “I hope you know that.”
Jane gives her a withering look. “No you would not have,” she tells her flatmate bluntly.
Sherlock returns the look. “The angles were sufficient to sever the entire pinna. What would you do then?”
“Send it to Mytrice,” Jane replies, sifting through butterfly sutures and bandages. “I think she’d appreciate it. Maybe she’d feel like you’re listening to her for a change.” Jane locates the large fabric plaster she’s been looking for, and begins dabbing at the blood ground into the lines of Sherlock’s palm with an antiseptic wipe.
“Oh, very droll,” Sherlock mutters, rolling her eyes as Jane dresses the wound.
“Give me those scissors,” Jane says, instead of continuing their spat.
“I’m not letting you cut my hair.”
“Well, after what’s just happened, I’m not letting you cut your hair,” Jane returns.
“Especially as you’ve clearly no idea what you’re doing.”
As always, Sherlock is drawn in by the prospect of expanding her already encyclopaedic knowledge of everything. Jane last used this trick to convince Sherlock to let them watch Jerry Springer, which was a mistake, as there are now several unmarked DVDs containing recordings of the show scattered around the flat, which have occasionally been mistaken for case evidence and handed over to Lestrade. She wasn’t very amused, as Jane recalls.
“What do you mean, I’ve clearly no idea what I’m doing?” Sherlock asks, parroting Jane’s words almost exactly.
Jane takes the opportunity to snatch the scissors from Sherlock’s lax grip and slip them into the waistband of her jeans. “Firstly,” she lectures. “You’re going to want to wet your hair before you start hacking bits off. Especially with your curls.”
Sherlock currently sported her dark hair in a pixie cut that had grown out, flicking into her eyes. She was constantly brushing the curls away from her face at crime scenes. Jane had been slightly bemused to notice the behaviour mimicked in Sam Donovan, whose springy curls did the exact same thing. The coincidence wasn’t lost on Lestrade, who spent that particular afternoon laughing with Anderson about the pair of them in a rare show of solidarity. Lestrade and Anderson could never, Jane had noticed, agree on anything other than hair, proper forensic procedure, good beer, and the superiority of Tina Fey to every other being on Earth.
“Fine,” Sherlock decides finally, petulantly. “You can do it.”
“I’m honoured,” Jane deadpans. “Sit on the edge of the bath, I’ll use the shower head.”
Sherlock plonks herself down on the cheap enamel, and throws a slightly threadbare towel around her shoulders like a queen with an ermine cape. She even looks regal in flannel pyjama pants and a man’s white T-shirt, with a scratchy, navy towel curled around her neck. Jane doesn’t quite understand it, so she steps into the empty bath and begins the complicated series of dials and pressing things at the same time that’s needed to turn the portable shower head on.
“Tip your head back,” Jane advises, and Sherlock obeys silently, staring at the ceiling with almost angry intensity.
“What is it?” Jane asks.
“I really hate the plaster in here. So...scattered. And rough.”
“We’ll do it over on the weekend.” Jane promises, and sprays Sherlock’s head with warm water.
She doesn’t so much as flinch, and when it’s fully soaked, Jane replaces the shower head and turns it off, anxious not to waste the hot water.
“There’s plenty left, you know,” Sherlock says, showing characteristic knowledge and characteristic ignorance all at once.
“I know,” Jane says awkwardly. “But it seems like such a waste.”
Sherlock shrugs, her hair rendered immovable by the water and stuck in awkward swirls across her cheeks and forehead. Jane drags a comb through the damp locks, pulling them towards her. Sherlock’s head follows, lolling back until Jane gently pushes it forward again. She can’t work through Sherlock’s tangles if she doesn’t have a counterweight. Sherlock hums in consternation, but her shoulders droop in relaxation.
“You just want me to reshape it to the way it was before, right?” Jane asks, checking they’re both on the same page.
“I’d rather have a Mohawk, actually, if that’s alright with you,” Sherlock responds, tugging absently on the corner of the towel. Jane snorts and hits her likely on the skull with the comb.
She unsheathes the scissors from her jeans, and tugs curl after curl upright, snipping away perfect little crescents that disintegrate at the touch of a fingertip. Sherlock amuses herself crumbling them and arranging them in what looks like complex DNA helixes. Jane focuses only on the rhythmic scraping of the scissors and the satisfaction of the cut beginning to take shape under her hands. They fall into that lovely companionable silence.
“Where did you learn to cut hair?” Sherlock asks abruptly.
Jane laughs slightly. “I was a baby dyke in a small town. I cut my own hair for nearly five years. A series of increasingly disastrous attempts to look butch and cool, I grant you, but just because they looked horrible on me doesn’t mean I didn’t cut the hair right. I just don’t have a very butch face.”
Sometimes Jane feels a bit sad about that. Sometimes she’s struck with jealousy at Lestrade’s close-cropped grey hair and single earring. Sometimes she loves fanning her fine blonde hair against a pillow, though, and sometimes being an army girl with long hair feels like her greatest achievement, considering the sheer amount of dust in Afghanistan.
“Hm.”
That’s all Sherlock will give her, and she thinks the conversation is over. It’s been quite explicit from the beginning that Jane is not straight, especially after Sarah. And Mary, who was lovely but just not quite ready to deal with Sherlock’s acerbic personality. And Claire, who played too much water polo for her own good and was as married to her passion as another lady Jane knows very well. But Jane still isn’t sure what Sherlock looks for in a partner. Jane still isn’t sure Sherlock wants a partner in the first place.
“Do you use that word a lot? I hadn’t noticed.” Sherlock is sometimes irritatingly cryptic, and Jane tells her so, bending a little to tend to the tight curls at the nape of her flatmate’s neck.
“Dyke,” Sherlock clarifies bluntly, the word sounding foreign in her mouth for reasons Jane doesn’t really understand.
“Well, yes,” Jane says falteringly, slightly blindsided by the twist in conversation. “I like it. Not when it’s used as insult, obviously. Liking women and identifying as a woman is kind of a qualifier for being allowed to use it, I think.”
“Hm,” Sherlock says again, and again there is a lengthy pause. But this pause puts Jane on edge, she feels like Sherlock is gearing up to something, and that makes her pretend to be far more absorbed in the haircut than she really should be.
“Would homoromantic demisexuality count as such a qualifier?” Sherlock asks, in something approaching tentative in its clinical wording.
Jane swallows. “I’m not really sure, to be honest Sherlock, is demisexuality...” She doesn’t know how to word the rest of her question. “Anyway,” she says instead. “’Homoromantic’ sounds like a good enough qualifier to me.”
She wonders if that half-smile quirked Sherlock’s face. She can’t see, of course. She hopes so.
Five minutes later, Sherlock says, “The gist of demisexuality is to find a person sexually attractive only after forming a strong emotional connection to them.”
Jane says “Ah,” and trims her fringe.
RATING: PG-13? Maybe? For swearing?
PAIRING: Fem!John/Fem!Sherlock
WORD COUNT: 1,174
DISCLAIMER: Nothing is mine, as always.
Part of the 'Hydrophilia' series of drabbles.
Everything they do, all of their firsts, involve water.
Jane is eating a biscuit when she first hears the clatter in the bathroom. She slowly lowers the shortbread back onto the coffee table, next to her morning paper and mug of tea, muscles tensed for several long seconds. After all, knowing Sherlock, assassins from the Knights Templar might have squeezed in through the window and the detective would be fighting them off with tiny razor blades. There are no sounds of furious battle, though, and Jane picks her biscuit up again. Hopefully Sherlock wasn’t messing with the plumbing. She was not washing at Mrs Turner’s again: she felt horrible intruding on Alice and Rebecca’s honeymoon bliss. And shower sex.
She is just about to bite into it when she hears Sherlock’s unmistakable “Oh, bugger it!” from the bathroom.
Sherlock’s voice is strange, Jane muses as she mourns the loss of her comfortable sugary morning. Low, bitingly upper-class, but with a smoker’s rasp that renders it very different to Mytrice’s glassy tones. And it carries these little remnants of hiding in the East End away from her sister’s eyes, the ‘wanker’s, the ‘blimey’s, the ‘bollocking fuck’s. Jane never thought Sherlock, with her oh-so-expensive coat and Pimlico accent, would swear quite as much, and quite as well, as she did.
Jane levers herself up with the crappy NHS-issue cane, before propping it up against an armrest. It’s getting up that sends that burning ache through her knee, not walking around. She crosses to the bathroom, and raps smartly on the stained wood.
“Sherlock? Everything alright in there?”
“Yes!” Sherlock replies hurriedly. There’s a pause and then a hissed expletive and several clangs of metal on floor tiles.
Jane sighs, a bit of amusement colouring her exasperation. “Sherlock, let me in, before you break something important, like a wall.”
There’s no verbal response, but Jane hears the scrape of the bolt moving back, and the door falling forward forces Jane to take a few steps back. Sherlock walks briskly back to whatever she was doing in there, in what Jane would call embarrassment in anybody else, but in Sherlock the hurry is just sensible conservation of available leisure time. Jane follows her in, not bothering to shut the door, noting the drops of blood on the floor.
Her brow crinkles in a frown. “Let me see it,” she says firmly, and Sherlock sticks a bloody hand in her general direction without taking her eyes from the mirror.
“Scissors,” she states, anticipating Jane’s question. “Haircut,” she continues, anticipating the next. Jane used to find this process of hers slightly jarring, but she’s now so used to it that speaking to normal people feels almost cumbersome. Sometimes she wonders if that’s how Sherlock feels all the time.
Jane roots around in the cupboard above Sherlock’s head, standing on her tip-toes to reach the first aid box, but her scrabbling only knocks the bloody thing further back and out of reach. Jane huffs in irritation and bumps Sherlock aside with her hip to step closer to the cupboard. Sherlock yelps indignantly as Jane’s hand closes on the green plastic handle.
“I could have cut my ear off,” she grumbles. “I hope you know that.”
Jane gives her a withering look. “No you would not have,” she tells her flatmate bluntly.
Sherlock returns the look. “The angles were sufficient to sever the entire pinna. What would you do then?”
“Send it to Mytrice,” Jane replies, sifting through butterfly sutures and bandages. “I think she’d appreciate it. Maybe she’d feel like you’re listening to her for a change.” Jane locates the large fabric plaster she’s been looking for, and begins dabbing at the blood ground into the lines of Sherlock’s palm with an antiseptic wipe.
“Oh, very droll,” Sherlock mutters, rolling her eyes as Jane dresses the wound.
“Give me those scissors,” Jane says, instead of continuing their spat.
“I’m not letting you cut my hair.”
“Well, after what’s just happened, I’m not letting you cut your hair,” Jane returns.
“Especially as you’ve clearly no idea what you’re doing.”
As always, Sherlock is drawn in by the prospect of expanding her already encyclopaedic knowledge of everything. Jane last used this trick to convince Sherlock to let them watch Jerry Springer, which was a mistake, as there are now several unmarked DVDs containing recordings of the show scattered around the flat, which have occasionally been mistaken for case evidence and handed over to Lestrade. She wasn’t very amused, as Jane recalls.
“What do you mean, I’ve clearly no idea what I’m doing?” Sherlock asks, parroting Jane’s words almost exactly.
Jane takes the opportunity to snatch the scissors from Sherlock’s lax grip and slip them into the waistband of her jeans. “Firstly,” she lectures. “You’re going to want to wet your hair before you start hacking bits off. Especially with your curls.”
Sherlock currently sported her dark hair in a pixie cut that had grown out, flicking into her eyes. She was constantly brushing the curls away from her face at crime scenes. Jane had been slightly bemused to notice the behaviour mimicked in Sam Donovan, whose springy curls did the exact same thing. The coincidence wasn’t lost on Lestrade, who spent that particular afternoon laughing with Anderson about the pair of them in a rare show of solidarity. Lestrade and Anderson could never, Jane had noticed, agree on anything other than hair, proper forensic procedure, good beer, and the superiority of Tina Fey to every other being on Earth.
“Fine,” Sherlock decides finally, petulantly. “You can do it.”
“I’m honoured,” Jane deadpans. “Sit on the edge of the bath, I’ll use the shower head.”
Sherlock plonks herself down on the cheap enamel, and throws a slightly threadbare towel around her shoulders like a queen with an ermine cape. She even looks regal in flannel pyjama pants and a man’s white T-shirt, with a scratchy, navy towel curled around her neck. Jane doesn’t quite understand it, so she steps into the empty bath and begins the complicated series of dials and pressing things at the same time that’s needed to turn the portable shower head on.
“Tip your head back,” Jane advises, and Sherlock obeys silently, staring at the ceiling with almost angry intensity.
“What is it?” Jane asks.
“I really hate the plaster in here. So...scattered. And rough.”
“We’ll do it over on the weekend.” Jane promises, and sprays Sherlock’s head with warm water.
She doesn’t so much as flinch, and when it’s fully soaked, Jane replaces the shower head and turns it off, anxious not to waste the hot water.
“There’s plenty left, you know,” Sherlock says, showing characteristic knowledge and characteristic ignorance all at once.
“I know,” Jane says awkwardly. “But it seems like such a waste.”
Sherlock shrugs, her hair rendered immovable by the water and stuck in awkward swirls across her cheeks and forehead. Jane drags a comb through the damp locks, pulling them towards her. Sherlock’s head follows, lolling back until Jane gently pushes it forward again. She can’t work through Sherlock’s tangles if she doesn’t have a counterweight. Sherlock hums in consternation, but her shoulders droop in relaxation.
“You just want me to reshape it to the way it was before, right?” Jane asks, checking they’re both on the same page.
“I’d rather have a Mohawk, actually, if that’s alright with you,” Sherlock responds, tugging absently on the corner of the towel. Jane snorts and hits her likely on the skull with the comb.
She unsheathes the scissors from her jeans, and tugs curl after curl upright, snipping away perfect little crescents that disintegrate at the touch of a fingertip. Sherlock amuses herself crumbling them and arranging them in what looks like complex DNA helixes. Jane focuses only on the rhythmic scraping of the scissors and the satisfaction of the cut beginning to take shape under her hands. They fall into that lovely companionable silence.
“Where did you learn to cut hair?” Sherlock asks abruptly.
Jane laughs slightly. “I was a baby dyke in a small town. I cut my own hair for nearly five years. A series of increasingly disastrous attempts to look butch and cool, I grant you, but just because they looked horrible on me doesn’t mean I didn’t cut the hair right. I just don’t have a very butch face.”
Sometimes Jane feels a bit sad about that. Sometimes she’s struck with jealousy at Lestrade’s close-cropped grey hair and single earring. Sometimes she loves fanning her fine blonde hair against a pillow, though, and sometimes being an army girl with long hair feels like her greatest achievement, considering the sheer amount of dust in Afghanistan.
“Hm.”
That’s all Sherlock will give her, and she thinks the conversation is over. It’s been quite explicit from the beginning that Jane is not straight, especially after Sarah. And Mary, who was lovely but just not quite ready to deal with Sherlock’s acerbic personality. And Claire, who played too much water polo for her own good and was as married to her passion as another lady Jane knows very well. But Jane still isn’t sure what Sherlock looks for in a partner. Jane still isn’t sure Sherlock wants a partner in the first place.
“Do you use that word a lot? I hadn’t noticed.” Sherlock is sometimes irritatingly cryptic, and Jane tells her so, bending a little to tend to the tight curls at the nape of her flatmate’s neck.
“Dyke,” Sherlock clarifies bluntly, the word sounding foreign in her mouth for reasons Jane doesn’t really understand.
“Well, yes,” Jane says falteringly, slightly blindsided by the twist in conversation. “I like it. Not when it’s used as insult, obviously. Liking women and identifying as a woman is kind of a qualifier for being allowed to use it, I think.”
“Hm,” Sherlock says again, and again there is a lengthy pause. But this pause puts Jane on edge, she feels like Sherlock is gearing up to something, and that makes her pretend to be far more absorbed in the haircut than she really should be.
“Would homoromantic demisexuality count as such a qualifier?” Sherlock asks, in something approaching tentative in its clinical wording.
Jane swallows. “I’m not really sure, to be honest Sherlock, is demisexuality...” She doesn’t know how to word the rest of her question. “Anyway,” she says instead. “’Homoromantic’ sounds like a good enough qualifier to me.”
She wonders if that half-smile quirked Sherlock’s face. She can’t see, of course. She hopes so.
Five minutes later, Sherlock says, “The gist of demisexuality is to find a person sexually attractive only after forming a strong emotional connection to them.”
Jane says “Ah,” and trims her fringe.