The Remarkable Worm

[marysutherland]

BBC Sherlock fic

Rating 12 (gen, mild swearing and adult situations)

Summary: A French decathlete's had a breakdown, but Sherlock has a match-box that may explain it all.

Inspired by one of the cases mentioned in The Sign of Three.

Betaed by Small Hobbit.

Comments

[marysutherland]

Pleased you enjoyed this. One of the interesting things Steven Moffat said when discussing Series 3 was that the characters had to evolve and that John couldn't just stay gawping in surprise at Sherlock's brilliance forever (even though ACD!Watson does just that). So I liked the idea of writing a casefic where John knows what his role as a conductor of light is, and what he can do to move the case along. And he also knows that part of his reward is to get to snark at Mycroft.

In the original ACD reference to the case, what's in Isadora Persano's matchbox is "a remarkable worm, said to be unknown to science". Put that together with the box glowing when Sherlock opened it in the scene in "The Sign of Three" and bloody Baskerville is really the least implausible option left. And it also helps with the problem of motivation - why did the scientists there decide to develop performance-enhancing worms and test them on a French decathlete? Because they could.

I hope to send you the Mary fic later this week, but depends on how hard RL is pressing me.