Nomino (R), Chapter 4
Title: NOMINO
Characters: John, Sherlock, Molly
Rating: R (warnings for character death, suicidal ideation and some violence)
Length: ~22K total
Summary: In a world where everyone is born with a name inscribed on his or her hand, finding your soulmate should be easy. And for John, it sort of is. It's what happens after he finds Sherlock that causes all the problems.
Notes: Originally posted in response to
casmomo's wonderful prompt on the meme. Click for disclaimer.
ch 1 | ch 2 | ch 3 | ch 4 | ch 5 | ch 6 | ch 7 | ch 8 | ch 9
CHAPTER 4
Back when John was in secondary school, there was a particular day every year in April when all the students in each form were gathered to receive The Talk. Who knew if they still did it now-The Talk was already outdated by the time John was in school, in the eighties. It was a rite of passage for the students, and everyone always awaited the specified day with a mixture of anticipation, dread, and raucous giggling.
Poor Miss Davies, with her floppy pork-pie hat and shapeless chintz dress. It was hopeless from the moment she stepped into the gymnasium. A wave of tittering and gossiping would arise from the female side, and a stonily amused silence from the male. She would totter over to the lonely chair planted in the center of the gym, and seat herself facing the two hundred or so fresh-faced savages on the bleachers.
“Ahem,” she always began in a surprisingly low voice. “Let us begin. Who here knows why we wear gloves?” Without waiting for the inevitable silence, she would shuffle through the list of attendees and pick on some unfortunate sod. “Mr. Fenton, what do you think?”
“’Cause we don’t want nosy gits to see our names. Miss.” A ripple of laughter.
“Indeed. Thank you Mr. Fenton,” Ms. Davies would say with unwavering calm. “We do this to protect the name of our soul mates, chosen from birth by Providence and revealed to each of us on our hand. This is one of the great mysteries of life, and we must each cherish and protect the name of our God-given soul mate as our dearest possession…” And she would continue in this strain for the next forty minutes, as the entire form slowly sank deeper and deeper into an inert torpor.
Except for one time.
“…and our soul mates-”
“Excuse me, Miss.”
Everyone turned. It was Marvin Goodman, a quiet and rather forgettable boy with wire-rimmed glasses and a pronounced Adam’s apple. John knew him vaguely from the locker room-Marvin was on the swim team, and John did rugby. He blushed slightly under the weight of the attention centred on him, but stood his ground.
Miss Davies looked mildly startled at the interruption, but recovered admirably. “Yes, dear?”
Marvin licked his lips. “Miss, people don’t call them ‘soul mates’ anymore, they say ‘matches.’ Look, even the curriculum has changed,” he stated, holding up the class syllabus, emblazed with the words Name Match Seminar, April 24th.
“Has it really?” Miss Davies sighed.
“Yes,” Marvin answered firmly. “ANIL lobbied Parliament a while ago to change it to something more politically correct.”
“ANIL?”
“The Anti-Name Identification League,” Marvin clarified. “You know, the organization behind the Right To Choose campaign.” Right To Choose, John mused, that rang a bell. He’d seen a poster for it outside Tesco’s on Sunday, something about the right to choose one’s partner, rather than simply going along with whatever name you’d been born with. He sat up a bit straighter, craning his neck to get a better view of Marvin. “I don’t believe in soul mates,” Marvin continued, ignoring the stares of his fellow students stoically. “Lots of people never find their name’s match, and they do alright. And lots of matches don’t work out, in the end.”
“A soul mate is not always a gift, indeed, sometimes it will seem a great responsibility,” Miss Davies intoned solemnly, bypassing Marvin’s point with relentless indifference.
“But, Miss,” Marvin interrupted again. He was red to the tips of his ears now. “What if you don’t want to fall in love with your match?” He clenched his hands into tight fists. John thought that he might love Marvin, just for a moment.
Miss Davies smiled serenely. “Don’t worry about it, dear. You’ll understand when you meet her.”
<><><><><>
“I’ll get a candle for the table. S’more romantic.”
“I’m not his date!”
<><><><><>
John liked Molly. She was smart and hardworking, and if she was a little awkward, she made up for it with good cheer. And sometimes it felt like she was the only person in the whole fucking world who believed that John and Sherlock were not an item. The fact that John liked Molly made it all the more painful to watch Sherlock play her like his bloody violin, while she smiled obliviously.
“So. What do we have?” Sherlock demanded, striding over to the body without sparing a glance for Molly.
For once, she didn’t seem to mind. “Dead two days. Initial autopsy indicates tetanus poisoning,” she stated dully, holding her clipboard like a barrier between herself and the detective. She was even more ill at ease than usual today, John noticed, and he thought he knew why from the pinkish tinge and slight swelling around her eyes. He guessed that “Jim from IT” wouldn’t be showing up around the morgue anymore.
“According to one of her staff, Raoul de Santos, she cut her hand on a rusty nail in the garden,” Sherlock muttered, ignoring Molly.
John leaned forward to get a look. “Nasty wound,” he commented, nodding at the woman’s right hand.
“Tetanus bacteria enters the bloodstream, and it’s Goodnight Vienna,” Sherlock concluded, circling the body like a hawk. He frowned. “Something’s wrong with this picture.”
“Eh?” John looked up.
“Can’t be as simple as it seems, otherwise the bomber wouldn’t be directing us to it,” Sherlock spat the words out quickly, loathe to waste breath on tiresome explanations. “Something’s wrong.”
John walked around the table, trying to coerce his exhausted brain into working, but all he could see was Dead Connie Prince and some black blotches that meant he could probably use another cup of coffee. The last few days had been a marathon of death and destruction. If the past was any indication, today would be the same. He roamed over to the woman’s other side, wearily noting the shallow scratches on her upper arm. Sherlock tensed and grimaced.
“Go away John. Your thinking is annoying,” he complained without looking up. He popped out his pocket magnifier, peering through it at woman’s forehead.
John sighed and sidled over to Molly, leaving Sherlock to contemplate the dead talk show host on his own. “Molly.”
She blinked at him, smiling wanly. “Hi. Does Sherlock need something?”
John felt a guilty pang. He realized that he didn’t really talk much to Molly outside of requests (or apologies) for Sherlock. Of course she would think that he “needed” her something. “No, nothing. Just wondering if you’d like a coffee.” She gave him an odd look, and John hurried to explain. “No, I didn’t mean…to be honest, I just want to get away from all the dead bodies for a moment. Maybe you could just point me towards the cafeteria?” Not that he needed direction, of course. The number of years he’d spent practically living in that cafeteria-he could probably find it in his sleep.
“Oh,” Molly brightened slightly, an understanding smile crossing her face. “Actually, coffee sounds lovely.” She peeled off her latex gloves, dropping them in the biohazard bin beside the disinfecting station before turning on the taps. John leaned against the counter, waiting as she washed her hands for the prescribed one-and-a-half minutes. It occurred to him that he’d never seen Sherlock use the disinfecting station before, but he shoved that disturbing thought down as quickly as he could.
“Ready?” he asked when she’d finished. She nodded. “Sherlock, we’re going for a coffee. Want anything?”
There was no response from Sherlock, but then John didn’t expect one. He shrugged at Molly, who smiled again, and they headed out the door.
They didn’t talk for bit, but it was a nice kind of silence. Molly seemed to relax the moment she was out the door-whether due to the absence of dead people or the absence of socially maladaptive detectives, he couldn’t tell. He certainly relaxed a bit when Sherlock wasn’t around.
Maybe it was the thought of Sherlock that led him to ask, “How did you meet Sherlock?” before his brain could mount a proper defense. He tensed, worried that he’d ruined their comfortable moment of quiet.
But Molly didn’t seem upset. Her lips even turned up a bit at the edges. “We met a few years ago, when I first started working here,” she replied, actually chuckling. “It’s a pretty funny story, actually.”
John raised an inquisitive eyebrow. “It was my first day,” Molly continued, “and Ted-he was the department administrator back then, passed away in January actually-was giving me a tour. We walked into one of the storage rooms, and Sherlock was in there.”
“Of course he was,” John commented, rolling his eyes. “I’ll bet he was nicking some body parts for his collection.”
“No,” Molly corrected, grinning now. “Even better. He’d gotten out all the feet-still attached to the bodies, of course-and was measuring their toenails. Ted went ballistic.”
John snorted. He could imagine the whole thing perfectly. “Typical. What happened?”
“Well, Ted was yelling about reporting him to the board or calling security, I’m not sure, but it was something like that. So he ran off.”
“Leaving you alone with Sherlock?” John was so horrified he stopped in the middle of the hallway and stared at her.
“I think he was so mad he just forgot about me,” Molly said, smiling a bit at John’s expression. “But it wasn’t that bad. Sherlock took me around to see the rest of the facilities. He seemed to know the place better than most of the employees.” Her eyes slid past John and she raised her right hand, unconsciously it seemed, to twirl the end of her ponytail. “Though, I’m not really sure whether he was giving me a tour or whether I was just following him around. He didn’t really say anything to me after the introductions.”
She looked vulnerable standing there with her hand in her hair. Fine brown strands kept getting caught in the girlish pink knit hand wrap, and John suddenly had to look away. There was something about the moment that was so revealing, so intimate. He kept his eyes safely pinned to the floor until she came back to herself. Her hand fell limply to her side and she huffed a sigh. “Sorry, what was I saying? My mind just wanders off sometimes…”
John shifted uneasily, licking his lips. “Nothing important, just how Sherlock is an arse.”
“Yeah,” she agreed with a smile, but it didn’t quite reach her eyes this time. “He can be a bit mean, sometimes.” The accusation held absolutely no venom, merely resignation and maybe, just maybe, a little bit of affection.
John had the sudden and overwhelming desire to apologize to Molly about something. Anything he said would be inadequate, but still he opened his mouth. “Listen, I’m so sorry about Jim. I know Sherlock…I’m sure Sherlock feels the same.”
Molly’s eyebrows raised skeptically and John cringed. He really was a rubbish liar. Harry had always said so. “Don’t worry about me,” Molly said with another one of those fake smiles. “I’m not really that broken up over Jim. Really, I should be thanking Sherlock for, um, letting me know.”
“No,” John said fervently, “you really shouldn’t. He was a prick, saying it like that.”
Molly tilted her head to one side, her fingers in her hair again. “But if he didn’t say it like that, he wouldn’t be Sherlock, would he?” she mused, twirling away. “Besides, it wasn’t like Jim was my match or anything. I’d choose Sherlock over him any day.” She raised her eyes to John's. "Just like you. Right?"
"What?"
Sherlock burst into the hall behind them, and they both started. Molly immediately pulled her hand out of her ponytail and tucked it into her pocket. “The cut’s too clean!” he announced, striding over to the pair of them. They’d only made it about ten yards from the lab, John realized. “How long’s the bacteria been incubating inside her?”
“To reach a toxic level, the bacteria would require at least-” Molly began, but Sherlock cut across her.
“John. Answer. Now.”
John looked helplessly at Molly, his gut twisting with pity. “Eight or nine days, probably,” he mumbled.
“Yes!” Sherlock nearly shouted in triumph. “And the cut was clearly made after death. So the only question now is: how did the tetanus enter the dead woman’s system?” He grabbed John’s arm. “You wanted to help, didn’t you? I need Connie Prince’s background, family history, everything, get me data.”
“Right,” John answered brusquely. He turned back to Molly. “Sorry about the coffee, Molly. Another time?”
“Yeah,” she replied tremulously. “That’d be-”
“Enough flirting!” Sherlock interrupted rudely, dragging John down the hall. “I know Molly tends to gravitate towards entirely unsuitable men, but you shouldn’t encourage her,” he scoffed, loud enough that the whole hall could hear. John didn’t look back, but he thought he heard a little sob of “okay” before they turned the corner.
NEXT >>
Characters: John, Sherlock, Molly
Rating: R (warnings for character death, suicidal ideation and some violence)
Length: ~22K total
Summary: In a world where everyone is born with a name inscribed on his or her hand, finding your soulmate should be easy. And for John, it sort of is. It's what happens after he finds Sherlock that causes all the problems.
Notes: Originally posted in response to
casmomo's wonderful prompt on the meme. Click for disclaimer.
ch 1 | ch 2 | ch 3 | ch 4 | ch 5 | ch 6 | ch 7 | ch 8 | ch 9
CHAPTER 4
Back when John was in secondary school, there was a particular day every year in April when all the students in each form were gathered to receive The Talk. Who knew if they still did it now-The Talk was already outdated by the time John was in school, in the eighties. It was a rite of passage for the students, and everyone always awaited the specified day with a mixture of anticipation, dread, and raucous giggling.
Poor Miss Davies, with her floppy pork-pie hat and shapeless chintz dress. It was hopeless from the moment she stepped into the gymnasium. A wave of tittering and gossiping would arise from the female side, and a stonily amused silence from the male. She would totter over to the lonely chair planted in the center of the gym, and seat herself facing the two hundred or so fresh-faced savages on the bleachers.
“Ahem,” she always began in a surprisingly low voice. “Let us begin. Who here knows why we wear gloves?” Without waiting for the inevitable silence, she would shuffle through the list of attendees and pick on some unfortunate sod. “Mr. Fenton, what do you think?”
“’Cause we don’t want nosy gits to see our names. Miss.” A ripple of laughter.
“Indeed. Thank you Mr. Fenton,” Ms. Davies would say with unwavering calm. “We do this to protect the name of our soul mates, chosen from birth by Providence and revealed to each of us on our hand. This is one of the great mysteries of life, and we must each cherish and protect the name of our God-given soul mate as our dearest possession…” And she would continue in this strain for the next forty minutes, as the entire form slowly sank deeper and deeper into an inert torpor.
Except for one time.
“…and our soul mates-”
“Excuse me, Miss.”
Everyone turned. It was Marvin Goodman, a quiet and rather forgettable boy with wire-rimmed glasses and a pronounced Adam’s apple. John knew him vaguely from the locker room-Marvin was on the swim team, and John did rugby. He blushed slightly under the weight of the attention centred on him, but stood his ground.
Miss Davies looked mildly startled at the interruption, but recovered admirably. “Yes, dear?”
Marvin licked his lips. “Miss, people don’t call them ‘soul mates’ anymore, they say ‘matches.’ Look, even the curriculum has changed,” he stated, holding up the class syllabus, emblazed with the words Name Match Seminar, April 24th.
“Has it really?” Miss Davies sighed.
“Yes,” Marvin answered firmly. “ANIL lobbied Parliament a while ago to change it to something more politically correct.”
“ANIL?”
“The Anti-Name Identification League,” Marvin clarified. “You know, the organization behind the Right To Choose campaign.” Right To Choose, John mused, that rang a bell. He’d seen a poster for it outside Tesco’s on Sunday, something about the right to choose one’s partner, rather than simply going along with whatever name you’d been born with. He sat up a bit straighter, craning his neck to get a better view of Marvin. “I don’t believe in soul mates,” Marvin continued, ignoring the stares of his fellow students stoically. “Lots of people never find their name’s match, and they do alright. And lots of matches don’t work out, in the end.”
“A soul mate is not always a gift, indeed, sometimes it will seem a great responsibility,” Miss Davies intoned solemnly, bypassing Marvin’s point with relentless indifference.
“But, Miss,” Marvin interrupted again. He was red to the tips of his ears now. “What if you don’t want to fall in love with your match?” He clenched his hands into tight fists. John thought that he might love Marvin, just for a moment.
Miss Davies smiled serenely. “Don’t worry about it, dear. You’ll understand when you meet her.”
<><><><><>
“I’ll get a candle for the table. S’more romantic.”
“I’m not his date!”
<><><><><>
John liked Molly. She was smart and hardworking, and if she was a little awkward, she made up for it with good cheer. And sometimes it felt like she was the only person in the whole fucking world who believed that John and Sherlock were not an item. The fact that John liked Molly made it all the more painful to watch Sherlock play her like his bloody violin, while she smiled obliviously.
“So. What do we have?” Sherlock demanded, striding over to the body without sparing a glance for Molly.
For once, she didn’t seem to mind. “Dead two days. Initial autopsy indicates tetanus poisoning,” she stated dully, holding her clipboard like a barrier between herself and the detective. She was even more ill at ease than usual today, John noticed, and he thought he knew why from the pinkish tinge and slight swelling around her eyes. He guessed that “Jim from IT” wouldn’t be showing up around the morgue anymore.
“According to one of her staff, Raoul de Santos, she cut her hand on a rusty nail in the garden,” Sherlock muttered, ignoring Molly.
John leaned forward to get a look. “Nasty wound,” he commented, nodding at the woman’s right hand.
“Tetanus bacteria enters the bloodstream, and it’s Goodnight Vienna,” Sherlock concluded, circling the body like a hawk. He frowned. “Something’s wrong with this picture.”
“Eh?” John looked up.
“Can’t be as simple as it seems, otherwise the bomber wouldn’t be directing us to it,” Sherlock spat the words out quickly, loathe to waste breath on tiresome explanations. “Something’s wrong.”
John walked around the table, trying to coerce his exhausted brain into working, but all he could see was Dead Connie Prince and some black blotches that meant he could probably use another cup of coffee. The last few days had been a marathon of death and destruction. If the past was any indication, today would be the same. He roamed over to the woman’s other side, wearily noting the shallow scratches on her upper arm. Sherlock tensed and grimaced.
“Go away John. Your thinking is annoying,” he complained without looking up. He popped out his pocket magnifier, peering through it at woman’s forehead.
John sighed and sidled over to Molly, leaving Sherlock to contemplate the dead talk show host on his own. “Molly.”
She blinked at him, smiling wanly. “Hi. Does Sherlock need something?”
John felt a guilty pang. He realized that he didn’t really talk much to Molly outside of requests (or apologies) for Sherlock. Of course she would think that he “needed” her something. “No, nothing. Just wondering if you’d like a coffee.” She gave him an odd look, and John hurried to explain. “No, I didn’t mean…to be honest, I just want to get away from all the dead bodies for a moment. Maybe you could just point me towards the cafeteria?” Not that he needed direction, of course. The number of years he’d spent practically living in that cafeteria-he could probably find it in his sleep.
“Oh,” Molly brightened slightly, an understanding smile crossing her face. “Actually, coffee sounds lovely.” She peeled off her latex gloves, dropping them in the biohazard bin beside the disinfecting station before turning on the taps. John leaned against the counter, waiting as she washed her hands for the prescribed one-and-a-half minutes. It occurred to him that he’d never seen Sherlock use the disinfecting station before, but he shoved that disturbing thought down as quickly as he could.
“Ready?” he asked when she’d finished. She nodded. “Sherlock, we’re going for a coffee. Want anything?”
There was no response from Sherlock, but then John didn’t expect one. He shrugged at Molly, who smiled again, and they headed out the door.
They didn’t talk for bit, but it was a nice kind of silence. Molly seemed to relax the moment she was out the door-whether due to the absence of dead people or the absence of socially maladaptive detectives, he couldn’t tell. He certainly relaxed a bit when Sherlock wasn’t around.
Maybe it was the thought of Sherlock that led him to ask, “How did you meet Sherlock?” before his brain could mount a proper defense. He tensed, worried that he’d ruined their comfortable moment of quiet.
But Molly didn’t seem upset. Her lips even turned up a bit at the edges. “We met a few years ago, when I first started working here,” she replied, actually chuckling. “It’s a pretty funny story, actually.”
John raised an inquisitive eyebrow. “It was my first day,” Molly continued, “and Ted-he was the department administrator back then, passed away in January actually-was giving me a tour. We walked into one of the storage rooms, and Sherlock was in there.”
“Of course he was,” John commented, rolling his eyes. “I’ll bet he was nicking some body parts for his collection.”
“No,” Molly corrected, grinning now. “Even better. He’d gotten out all the feet-still attached to the bodies, of course-and was measuring their toenails. Ted went ballistic.”
John snorted. He could imagine the whole thing perfectly. “Typical. What happened?”
“Well, Ted was yelling about reporting him to the board or calling security, I’m not sure, but it was something like that. So he ran off.”
“Leaving you alone with Sherlock?” John was so horrified he stopped in the middle of the hallway and stared at her.
“I think he was so mad he just forgot about me,” Molly said, smiling a bit at John’s expression. “But it wasn’t that bad. Sherlock took me around to see the rest of the facilities. He seemed to know the place better than most of the employees.” Her eyes slid past John and she raised her right hand, unconsciously it seemed, to twirl the end of her ponytail. “Though, I’m not really sure whether he was giving me a tour or whether I was just following him around. He didn’t really say anything to me after the introductions.”
She looked vulnerable standing there with her hand in her hair. Fine brown strands kept getting caught in the girlish pink knit hand wrap, and John suddenly had to look away. There was something about the moment that was so revealing, so intimate. He kept his eyes safely pinned to the floor until she came back to herself. Her hand fell limply to her side and she huffed a sigh. “Sorry, what was I saying? My mind just wanders off sometimes…”
John shifted uneasily, licking his lips. “Nothing important, just how Sherlock is an arse.”
“Yeah,” she agreed with a smile, but it didn’t quite reach her eyes this time. “He can be a bit mean, sometimes.” The accusation held absolutely no venom, merely resignation and maybe, just maybe, a little bit of affection.
John had the sudden and overwhelming desire to apologize to Molly about something. Anything he said would be inadequate, but still he opened his mouth. “Listen, I’m so sorry about Jim. I know Sherlock…I’m sure Sherlock feels the same.”
Molly’s eyebrows raised skeptically and John cringed. He really was a rubbish liar. Harry had always said so. “Don’t worry about me,” Molly said with another one of those fake smiles. “I’m not really that broken up over Jim. Really, I should be thanking Sherlock for, um, letting me know.”
“No,” John said fervently, “you really shouldn’t. He was a prick, saying it like that.”
Molly tilted her head to one side, her fingers in her hair again. “But if he didn’t say it like that, he wouldn’t be Sherlock, would he?” she mused, twirling away. “Besides, it wasn’t like Jim was my match or anything. I’d choose Sherlock over him any day.” She raised her eyes to John's. "Just like you. Right?"
"What?"
Sherlock burst into the hall behind them, and they both started. Molly immediately pulled her hand out of her ponytail and tucked it into her pocket. “The cut’s too clean!” he announced, striding over to the pair of them. They’d only made it about ten yards from the lab, John realized. “How long’s the bacteria been incubating inside her?”
“To reach a toxic level, the bacteria would require at least-” Molly began, but Sherlock cut across her.
“John. Answer. Now.”
John looked helplessly at Molly, his gut twisting with pity. “Eight or nine days, probably,” he mumbled.
“Yes!” Sherlock nearly shouted in triumph. “And the cut was clearly made after death. So the only question now is: how did the tetanus enter the dead woman’s system?” He grabbed John’s arm. “You wanted to help, didn’t you? I need Connie Prince’s background, family history, everything, get me data.”
“Right,” John answered brusquely. He turned back to Molly. “Sorry about the coffee, Molly. Another time?”
“Yeah,” she replied tremulously. “That’d be-”
“Enough flirting!” Sherlock interrupted rudely, dragging John down the hall. “I know Molly tends to gravitate towards entirely unsuitable men, but you shouldn’t encourage her,” he scoffed, loud enough that the whole hall could hear. John didn’t look back, but he thought he heard a little sob of “okay” before they turned the corner.
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