Fic: The Switch (3/?)
Title: The Switch
Author: metaphlame
Alternate Links: AO3
Rating: R
Summary: Some handle the sudden global switching of gendered bodies better than others.
Characters/Pairings: John/Sherlock (eventually)
Warnings: AU, Genderswap, discussion touches on miscarriage
Chapter Notes: A case at last. Also, Lestrade.
After the initial shock that accompanied the period following the Switch, the numbers of thefts, assaults and murders picked back up to their usual levels. Whatever philosophizing sycophants wished to posit about a reversal of X and Y chromosomes and the social implications of a biological shift in what was formerly the more violence-prone segment of the population, there were still crimes to solve.
There would always be crimes to solve.
Computers, it turned out, were rather unimpressed with the reversal of the sexes. Facial recognition software, even at the rudimentary stage it was then in, found little difficulty pinning a burglary on the woman caught on camera robbing a chip shop who had robbed the same shop six months ago as a man. Facebook went more or less unperturbed by the upheaval of its populace. Apple's iPhoto still clustered the little boy of today with the little girl he had been not long ago.
Thus the first few weeks of the Switch were fairly underwhelming for Sherlock. Vastly overestimating the amount of cover their change would give them, criminals the world over threw caution to the winds, taking absurd risks so obvious even the incompetents over at Scotland Yard--as Sherlock was so fond of reminding anyone and everyone--couldn't miss them. At least not with the aid of the basic technologies so widespread by that point.
It was terribly boring, really.
Five blistering concertos into the dry spell of cases, John was more than a little grateful when Lestrade's face--the one John knew--appeared on Sherlock's phone.
"Answer it," Sherlock ordered from the kitchen, where his eyes were narrowed on a slender glass beaker bubbling over a flame. "I'm busy."
John sighed and got up from his armchair to retrieve the phone from sofa cushions where it lay chiming and flashing Lestrade's face caught at a most unflattering angle--probably taken, from the looks of it, when he'd just been resounding and deservingly mocked by a certain consulting detective.
"Sherlock's phone!" John cried almost cheerfully. "Lestrade, it's been ages."
"Yes, well," sighed a woman's voice, tired and strained. "Things've happened. You might've noticed."
Humor, it seemed to John, was one way people were dealing with this, and he thought he should try. "I may have noticed," he chuckled, sounding a bit too forced. He thought he caught Sherlock rolling his eyes, but he didn't glance over fast enough to be sure.
"Right. Well, when you can drag Sherlock away from whatever crazy experiment he's working on, could you get him to head over to the Garden Bridge site? He, ah…he still uses 'he,' right?"
"Oh." John scrubbed a hand through his hair; he'd have to get it cut soon. "He does, yeah. You?"
"I do. But Anderson's a she, if you see him. Her. Can't stand the dissonance, she says."
"Okay." John didn't know what else to say. "We'll--" He turned, and Sherlock was standing in the doorway, fully dressed, arms crossed. Impatient. "We'll be right there."
Their cabbie was a woman in a bright blue sari. Watching her, John wondered if what he saw as the more strictly-defined gender roles of other cultures helped the cabbie's transition, or hurt it. He or she certainly didn't seem perturbed in the least as she ferreted them out into the stream of traffic, listening to a Hindi radio station. Next to him, the dull white glow of a smartphone screen lit up Sherlock's face from below; he was typing furiously and would be pointless to interrupt with questions he'd just ignore.
"Neither harder nor easier, John," Sherlock said suddenly, eyes never leaving the screen in his hands.
John blinked. "Come again?"
"It makes it neither harder nor easier." His eyes flicked toward the front for only a moment. "Don't be so stupid, it doesn't become you."
"I'll, um, try to avoid that in the future," John replied, glancing involuntarily toward the rear-view mirror to see if the cabbie had registered any of this. She still bobbed her head faintly to the music, murmuring along with the chorus of the song.
"At least until she gets pregnant," Sherlock added.
John blinked again, but remained silent this time. He hadn't even considered pregnancy. Not for himself, anyway. He didn't think any of the newly-minted females he'd treated so far in the surgery had, either. Christ, did the list of things he had to take into account now never end?
They reached the Garden Bridge site--a cleared-out area on the south bank intended once to be the starting point of a great plant-laden span for pedestrians only, arcing out over the river to provide a little greenery and a lot of traffic alleviation. John had seen the mock-ups in the papers; it had been intended to be dominated by trees and shrubs, but the supports had carried a distinctly fluted shape, like the upside-down claws of an antique bathtub. For this reason the bridge had met no little amount of resistance in its planning stages; now that the time and space had finally been set aside for its construction the money had dried up, leaving only this cavernous construction site and a few hundred rightfully furious people turned out of their homes and businesses for no good reason.
Lestrade, coming over to their cab as they stepped out, had clearly gone a long way further even then Sherlock had dragged John in kitting himself out in his new identity. Heeled leather boots clung halfway up his well-formed legs which--John squinted at them in the late afternoon sunlight--most definitely appeared shaved. His skirt, silk scarf and jacket all hung comfortably on him, even if he did move a bit cautiously in the heels. A black armband snugged the coat tight around his left arm and John gaped.
"I…I'm sorry for your loss," he stammered.
Lestrade, in tasteful makeup and whose square jaw set off his face well beneath his still-very-short hair, looked away. "Thanks."
"I wasn't even aware you were trying," said Sherlock, cocking his head and narrowing his eyes in that way that reeked of analysis. "You weren't, were you?"
"Shut up, Sherlock," John snapped.
"You weren't," Sherlock repeated.
"No. I wasn't. She wasn't going to tell me until--you know. Until it's safe."
"Thirteen weeks." Sherlock's voice was clipped, professional.
"Right. And then this happened." Lestrade's arms rose out to either side, encompassing the whole of him--boots, legs, A-line coat. Black armband marking him as a parent of one of the Lost. The children in the wombs of pregnant women who, upon changing into men, had winked out of existence, leaving tragedy in their wake. "She, ah. She wants to try again."
It took John a moment to process what this meant.
"You might consider a fertility clinic," Sherlock murmured distractedly, eyes already roving over the construction site, bored with Lestrade. "Your clock is ticking. Isn't that what they say?"
"Jesus, Sherlock, show some compassion!" John snarled, but Lestrade didn't seem to be listening.
"All this. The clothes, the…" He gestured with varnished nails toward his face. "All hers. We're the same size, I guess." He sighed. John knew those eyes, only in a different face--rounder, more naked, a little grizzled maybe. This Lestrade carried several burdens at once. "She thought it would make it easier. Look better."
John frowned. "Look better?"
Lestrade rubbed his face in a gesture John recognized from before the Switch, smearing his lipstick across one cheek. "You know. Man and woman, that sort of thing."
"But you're not," John insisted.
"Aren't I? I have a clock now. Which ticks, so I hear." Lestrade's flat stare was wasted on Sherlock, who wasn't even pretending to pay attention anymore, drifting farther and farther down the slope of the embankment.
"But that's hardly--but you're still you, George. Like all of us. You still go by he, don't you?"
"Yes, but she wants me to switch. I'm…on the fence about it."
John fought twin urges to excoriate and to temper his sudden outrage--where did this come from?--with sympathy. This man had just lost a child, after all. "But…how does any of that signify anymore? For any of us? Man and woman…what does that even mean?"
Lestrade caught sight of his hand, stained by smeared lipstick, and winced, touching his face. "For me? It's a chance to give my wife part of herself back." He shook his head. "Husband, I mean. She wants me to call her my husband."
Into the silence John didn't have the first idea how to fill came Sherlock's petulant sigh. "Surely you have a mystery for us to solve here, detective? Or did you call us all the way out here to discuss your love life?"
“Down there, in the barrels,” Lestrade called, then lowered his voice for only John to hear. “He really doesn’t mind, does he? Same old Sherlock, poking around murder scenes. Business as usual to him.”
“This is actually the first case we’ve had in quite a long time,” John replied, evasive. A tightness between his shoulder blades, a flutter in his gut.
“That wasn’t what I meant.”
They watched Sherlock slide down the dirt bank and shame the milling investigators away from the bright orange barrels, his voice dripping with disdain even from this distance. Soon he was removing implements from his pockets and bending close over the barrels, where John guessed something grisly had gone on.
“I don’t think he minds,” he said after a moment. Still watching. “I think he stands outside all this.” He thought of Sherlock’s reprimand--wrong, wrong, wrong--and chose not to mention that particular conversation. “He still stalks round the flat, plays the violin, shows next to no regard for the feelings of others. He...doesn’t even look that different,” he added, after a moment’s hesitation.
Lestrade--the new Lestrade--shot him a speculative look. “Neither do you, you know. Before all this, do you know if Sherlock...if he...what his preferences were?”
The flutter in John’s gut threatened to become a thundering of wings. “What? No! No, I have no idea, I never asked--I mean, I did, but he said no. To anything.” He felt his face flush. “I mean, he has no preferences, is what I mean.”
“None?”
“No.”
Lestrade smiled then, the first smile John had seen from him since they stepped out of the cab. “I guess it must be easier when you--”
“John!” Sherlock’s voice, authoritative, expectant, shot up from the construction site below the mound of earth on which they stood. “I am in need of your assistance! What are you doing, still up there?”
“Duty calls,” John muttered, and scrambled down the embankment less than gracefully. Not at all hurrying to escape Lestrade’s line of questioning, he told himself. Not in the slightest.
Behind him, in his slender black boots and pale fluttering scarf, Lestrade continued to smile, if a touch sadly.
Author: metaphlame
Alternate Links: AO3
Rating: R
Summary: Some handle the sudden global switching of gendered bodies better than others.
Characters/Pairings: John/Sherlock (eventually)
Warnings: AU, Genderswap, discussion touches on miscarriage
Chapter Notes: A case at last. Also, Lestrade.
After the initial shock that accompanied the period following the Switch, the numbers of thefts, assaults and murders picked back up to their usual levels. Whatever philosophizing sycophants wished to posit about a reversal of X and Y chromosomes and the social implications of a biological shift in what was formerly the more violence-prone segment of the population, there were still crimes to solve.
There would always be crimes to solve.
Computers, it turned out, were rather unimpressed with the reversal of the sexes. Facial recognition software, even at the rudimentary stage it was then in, found little difficulty pinning a burglary on the woman caught on camera robbing a chip shop who had robbed the same shop six months ago as a man. Facebook went more or less unperturbed by the upheaval of its populace. Apple's iPhoto still clustered the little boy of today with the little girl he had been not long ago.
Thus the first few weeks of the Switch were fairly underwhelming for Sherlock. Vastly overestimating the amount of cover their change would give them, criminals the world over threw caution to the winds, taking absurd risks so obvious even the incompetents over at Scotland Yard--as Sherlock was so fond of reminding anyone and everyone--couldn't miss them. At least not with the aid of the basic technologies so widespread by that point.
It was terribly boring, really.
Five blistering concertos into the dry spell of cases, John was more than a little grateful when Lestrade's face--the one John knew--appeared on Sherlock's phone.
"Answer it," Sherlock ordered from the kitchen, where his eyes were narrowed on a slender glass beaker bubbling over a flame. "I'm busy."
John sighed and got up from his armchair to retrieve the phone from sofa cushions where it lay chiming and flashing Lestrade's face caught at a most unflattering angle--probably taken, from the looks of it, when he'd just been resounding and deservingly mocked by a certain consulting detective.
"Sherlock's phone!" John cried almost cheerfully. "Lestrade, it's been ages."
"Yes, well," sighed a woman's voice, tired and strained. "Things've happened. You might've noticed."
Humor, it seemed to John, was one way people were dealing with this, and he thought he should try. "I may have noticed," he chuckled, sounding a bit too forced. He thought he caught Sherlock rolling his eyes, but he didn't glance over fast enough to be sure.
"Right. Well, when you can drag Sherlock away from whatever crazy experiment he's working on, could you get him to head over to the Garden Bridge site? He, ah…he still uses 'he,' right?"
"Oh." John scrubbed a hand through his hair; he'd have to get it cut soon. "He does, yeah. You?"
"I do. But Anderson's a she, if you see him. Her. Can't stand the dissonance, she says."
"Okay." John didn't know what else to say. "We'll--" He turned, and Sherlock was standing in the doorway, fully dressed, arms crossed. Impatient. "We'll be right there."
Their cabbie was a woman in a bright blue sari. Watching her, John wondered if what he saw as the more strictly-defined gender roles of other cultures helped the cabbie's transition, or hurt it. He or she certainly didn't seem perturbed in the least as she ferreted them out into the stream of traffic, listening to a Hindi radio station. Next to him, the dull white glow of a smartphone screen lit up Sherlock's face from below; he was typing furiously and would be pointless to interrupt with questions he'd just ignore.
"Neither harder nor easier, John," Sherlock said suddenly, eyes never leaving the screen in his hands.
John blinked. "Come again?"
"It makes it neither harder nor easier." His eyes flicked toward the front for only a moment. "Don't be so stupid, it doesn't become you."
"I'll, um, try to avoid that in the future," John replied, glancing involuntarily toward the rear-view mirror to see if the cabbie had registered any of this. She still bobbed her head faintly to the music, murmuring along with the chorus of the song.
"At least until she gets pregnant," Sherlock added.
John blinked again, but remained silent this time. He hadn't even considered pregnancy. Not for himself, anyway. He didn't think any of the newly-minted females he'd treated so far in the surgery had, either. Christ, did the list of things he had to take into account now never end?
They reached the Garden Bridge site--a cleared-out area on the south bank intended once to be the starting point of a great plant-laden span for pedestrians only, arcing out over the river to provide a little greenery and a lot of traffic alleviation. John had seen the mock-ups in the papers; it had been intended to be dominated by trees and shrubs, but the supports had carried a distinctly fluted shape, like the upside-down claws of an antique bathtub. For this reason the bridge had met no little amount of resistance in its planning stages; now that the time and space had finally been set aside for its construction the money had dried up, leaving only this cavernous construction site and a few hundred rightfully furious people turned out of their homes and businesses for no good reason.
Lestrade, coming over to their cab as they stepped out, had clearly gone a long way further even then Sherlock had dragged John in kitting himself out in his new identity. Heeled leather boots clung halfway up his well-formed legs which--John squinted at them in the late afternoon sunlight--most definitely appeared shaved. His skirt, silk scarf and jacket all hung comfortably on him, even if he did move a bit cautiously in the heels. A black armband snugged the coat tight around his left arm and John gaped.
"I…I'm sorry for your loss," he stammered.
Lestrade, in tasteful makeup and whose square jaw set off his face well beneath his still-very-short hair, looked away. "Thanks."
"I wasn't even aware you were trying," said Sherlock, cocking his head and narrowing his eyes in that way that reeked of analysis. "You weren't, were you?"
"Shut up, Sherlock," John snapped.
"You weren't," Sherlock repeated.
"No. I wasn't. She wasn't going to tell me until--you know. Until it's safe."
"Thirteen weeks." Sherlock's voice was clipped, professional.
"Right. And then this happened." Lestrade's arms rose out to either side, encompassing the whole of him--boots, legs, A-line coat. Black armband marking him as a parent of one of the Lost. The children in the wombs of pregnant women who, upon changing into men, had winked out of existence, leaving tragedy in their wake. "She, ah. She wants to try again."
It took John a moment to process what this meant.
"You might consider a fertility clinic," Sherlock murmured distractedly, eyes already roving over the construction site, bored with Lestrade. "Your clock is ticking. Isn't that what they say?"
"Jesus, Sherlock, show some compassion!" John snarled, but Lestrade didn't seem to be listening.
"All this. The clothes, the…" He gestured with varnished nails toward his face. "All hers. We're the same size, I guess." He sighed. John knew those eyes, only in a different face--rounder, more naked, a little grizzled maybe. This Lestrade carried several burdens at once. "She thought it would make it easier. Look better."
John frowned. "Look better?"
Lestrade rubbed his face in a gesture John recognized from before the Switch, smearing his lipstick across one cheek. "You know. Man and woman, that sort of thing."
"But you're not," John insisted.
"Aren't I? I have a clock now. Which ticks, so I hear." Lestrade's flat stare was wasted on Sherlock, who wasn't even pretending to pay attention anymore, drifting farther and farther down the slope of the embankment.
"But that's hardly--but you're still you, George. Like all of us. You still go by he, don't you?"
"Yes, but she wants me to switch. I'm…on the fence about it."
John fought twin urges to excoriate and to temper his sudden outrage--where did this come from?--with sympathy. This man had just lost a child, after all. "But…how does any of that signify anymore? For any of us? Man and woman…what does that even mean?"
Lestrade caught sight of his hand, stained by smeared lipstick, and winced, touching his face. "For me? It's a chance to give my wife part of herself back." He shook his head. "Husband, I mean. She wants me to call her my husband."
Into the silence John didn't have the first idea how to fill came Sherlock's petulant sigh. "Surely you have a mystery for us to solve here, detective? Or did you call us all the way out here to discuss your love life?"
“Down there, in the barrels,” Lestrade called, then lowered his voice for only John to hear. “He really doesn’t mind, does he? Same old Sherlock, poking around murder scenes. Business as usual to him.”
“This is actually the first case we’ve had in quite a long time,” John replied, evasive. A tightness between his shoulder blades, a flutter in his gut.
“That wasn’t what I meant.”
They watched Sherlock slide down the dirt bank and shame the milling investigators away from the bright orange barrels, his voice dripping with disdain even from this distance. Soon he was removing implements from his pockets and bending close over the barrels, where John guessed something grisly had gone on.
“I don’t think he minds,” he said after a moment. Still watching. “I think he stands outside all this.” He thought of Sherlock’s reprimand--wrong, wrong, wrong--and chose not to mention that particular conversation. “He still stalks round the flat, plays the violin, shows next to no regard for the feelings of others. He...doesn’t even look that different,” he added, after a moment’s hesitation.
Lestrade--the new Lestrade--shot him a speculative look. “Neither do you, you know. Before all this, do you know if Sherlock...if he...what his preferences were?”
The flutter in John’s gut threatened to become a thundering of wings. “What? No! No, I have no idea, I never asked--I mean, I did, but he said no. To anything.” He felt his face flush. “I mean, he has no preferences, is what I mean.”
“None?”
“No.”
Lestrade smiled then, the first smile John had seen from him since they stepped out of the cab. “I guess it must be easier when you--”
“John!” Sherlock’s voice, authoritative, expectant, shot up from the construction site below the mound of earth on which they stood. “I am in need of your assistance! What are you doing, still up there?”
“Duty calls,” John muttered, and scrambled down the embankment less than gracefully. Not at all hurrying to escape Lestrade’s line of questioning, he told himself. Not in the slightest.
Behind him, in his slender black boots and pale fluttering scarf, Lestrade continued to smile, if a touch sadly.