Fic for monkiainen: Misadventure
Title: Misadventure
Recipient: monkiainen
Author: amindamazed
Fandom: Elementary
Characters/Pairings: Joan Watson & Sherlock Holmes; Marcus Bell
Rating: Teen
Warnings: None
Summary:
When Joan came downstairs the next morning, Sherlock was sitting at the lock room table, clutter pushed to one side, and a spilled cup of coffee pooled next to his resting forearm. He glared at the cast as if it had broken his wrist.
She paused on her way to the kitchen, hands on her hips. "What happened to being ambidextrous?"
Notes: I'm sure I'll find more typos, which I can easily fix on AO3 without pestering our kind mods, so that's the preferred version to read once the link is added below.
AO3 link: Misadventure
Read on LJ:
They had an impromptu Charlie Chaplin movie marathon up on the roof one unseasonably warm October evening. Three films that Sherlock lectured over the entire time, clearly enthralled by the artistry and artifice of the stunts and effects. Alfredo came over and brought his sister and niece. Marcus showed up half-way through, more than welcome with a bag of tortilla chips and homemade guacamole. It was finally starting to get chilly, and he was particularly impressed that they had a crockpot of hot cider plugged in under the table with the film projector. Joan was impressed that Sherlock hadn't tripped over the extension cord stretching from the stairwell to the table, the way he kept jumping up to point out things Chaplin did.
Nobody seemed surprised they had a film projector, much less actual films to play on it. The Brownstone was like an overstuffed clown car, with an endless parade of unlikely objects spilling out of it. And if any of those items were broken, Sherlock found a way to fix them or to cannibalize them to fix something else. He spent half his sleepless nights tinkering, occasionally with something case-related or, he claimed, likely to be, as with the bomb kits his explosives expert periodically sent him to play with. More often he ended up taking things apart and either putting them back together better or making something entirely new out of them before starting all over again.
Joan sometimes imagined a perpetual motion machine inside Sherlock's head, endlessly spinning and ever ready for something worthy of its power. Something to do. Mental puzzles stimulated and energized him, but physical tasks let his mind rest even as his hands and body worked out a solution. He craved both, and dancing around crime scenes was the best outlet he'd found to channel those means to productive ends. The process of solving the mystery of how and why someone died brought his talents together like nothing else. That he also secretly enjoyed being in the company of crime-solving peers was a bonus he acknowledged only rarely. For all his disdain of social niceties, he enjoyed working with people. She wasn't the first person he'd offered to teach, nor the last. He liked having a partner, someone to appreciate what he did and someone whose contributions he could learn from in turn. If she ever couldn't be there, Joan found some comfort knowing he'd find other companions to do the work with him.
The difficulty came when the process stalled. Usually that happened when there was a lull in NYPD cases. A few notable times of trouble came when his mind snagged on something less than productive: Avenging Irene. Attempting to understand Moriarty. Heroin. All his energy, ingenuity, and dexterity focused on something not only deadly but unworthy of his attention. Not that Joan had much say in the matter. He had the right to send and receive any letters he chose. She didn't have to like it, though.
The few times he'd been sick since she'd known him, he simply pushed through to work, a bit slower than he liked but only held back by lack of energy. The one time he'd been injured before this was when he was shot in the back by Moriarty's mutinous henchman. He pushed through that time too, despite exhaustion and pain (mental and physical) bringing him dangerously close to relapse. Thankfully everything came to a head within a few days, at which point his traditional crash into unconsciousness to make up for days of not sleeping coincided nicely with his shoulder's need to heal.
This time his broken wrist generated a perfect storm of intriguing police cases denied, leaving his energy and focus thwarted, according to him, because of superficial physical limitations blown far out of proportion by paranoid legal patsies. Physical limitations and bureaucratic bullshit, as he charmingly shouted into the phone after Gregson hung up on him and then repeated several more times while ranting throughout the brownstone. Policy and liability requirements conspired to keep him from acting in the public good, shortsighted nonsense that would eventually drive him mad.
Unfortunately, all the other projects he had going at the time required two hands or arms, either for delicate adjustments or bilateral strength or both. None of his cold cases were of any interest whatsoever. None of hers, either, for that matter, and he had the nerve to be insulted when she offered, at which point she left the house for three hours, coming back not when she was ready but when her anxiety over what other bones he might break out of frustration became too strong to ignore. By day fifteen Joan was at wit's end.
The night it happened, Marcus called her from the hospital after realizing she wasn't there because Sherlock hadn't let her know. When Marcus told her it was a simple fracture, that he'd have Sherlock home in an hour so, and she didn't need to rush over, she actually believed him, which is not what would have happened if she'd heard all that from Sherlock himself. She didn't know if that's what Sherlock knew too, or if he had other reasons for keeping it from her.
"He says it's because you'd 'over-react' and demand a full-body cast or induced coma and never leave him alone with your fussing." It was clear from Marcus's soft chuckle that he thought fussing wasn't something she'd tend toward.
"Huh. I'll file those suggestions away for future reference. Might want them by the end of the month, but I'll take my chances with whatever immobilization they gave him for now. Did they let him pick the color?"
When he did get home, Sherlock shoved a large envelope at her as he walked across the lock room to the stairs, and continued down without saying a word. He wasn't wearing a sling but held his arm so the bright green cast crossed his chest. She heard first the single door to his room bang shut, and then the rattle of the french doors closing. Then silence. There was a light tap on the glass of the inner door behind her, and she turned to see Marcus standing just inside the foyer. "The door was open," he said, nodding backwards to the front door, which he pushed closed. "I guess he was in a hurry."
"He's gone down to sulk in his lair, sounds like. I'd offer you something to drink, but I think it's probably better not to venture too close just yet."
"I can't tell if he's mad because he's embarrassed or embarrassed that he got mad."
"What did happen?" She took a look inside the envelope and saw it was the paperwork from the hospital.
"He didn't say?"
"Nope. Didn't call from the hospital and didn't say anything just now. Handed me this," she waved the envelope, "and went straight downstairs without a word; all I know is what you told me on the phone. Fell and broke his wrist."
"Slipped, really. We had to cross an ice rink. We thought it had been drained before it went out of business, but either it hadn't or there was a leak. He charged across like he always does, and then suddenly it was like… Like he was walking on ball bearings." Marcus bit his lip, then cleared his throat. "Um. At first I honestly thought he was showing off. It was…well, it was like a Charlie Chaplin stunt, arms waving like windmills, like in that movie. The way his feet flew out from under him. Then, wham." He winced. "The look on his face - that's when I knew he wasn't fooling."
Although she'd never known Sherlock to joke around like that at a crime scene, she could understand Marcus's mistake. Sherlock was remarkably agile, more than most people she knew. He was often quite graceful zipping around a crime scene when not contorting himself to get his nose closer to things most people would go out of their way to avoid smelling. The one time they'd gone undercover at a fancy-dress event she hadn't been surprised at all when he pulled her onto the dance floor and waltzed her across the room like Fred Astaire in time to catch the security-guard suspect before he slipped out the back. The mishap Marcus described wasn't what she would have expected, even if Sherlock had never gone skating in his life. She considered what little she knew about his childhood. Perhaps he hadn't.
Marcus continued. "The worst part was that he couldn't get up one-handed, so there was a bit more flopping…and, um, flailing. He kept trying to get me to go on ahead, but I couldn't leave him there. And that just pissed him off more. Learned a few colorful British idioms for my trouble."
She made a rueful face. "Sorry about that."
"Hey, not your fault. Not really his, either. I'd probably feel the same if it happened to me."
"But you might choose different words to express your feelings." She forced herself not to look down with the sudden memory of holding Marcus in the street when he collapsed from a gunshot wound to the abdomen. He hadn't uttered a word then. And neither had Sherlock.
Marcus laughed. "Yeah, maybe. Might not be any nicer, though." He kicked up his left foot. "I broke my toe when I was twelve and ended up grounded for swearing."
Joan laughed in turn. "No special dispensation under the circumstances?"
"Not from my mom. To be fair, a zero-tolerance policy was probably the only option, with me and Andre."
"What, you mean you two were trouble-makers? I'm shocked!" She smiled, thinking of the yellowed photo of his mother he had on his desk at the station. "Oren and I tended to set each other up to take the fall. No sibling solidarity for us." She wondered if there'd ever been any camaraderie between the Holmes brothers. Certainly little sign of that now. She sighed, and Marcus stepped back toward the front door.
"Okay, unless you need anything, I'll take off, let you rest up while you can. Just in case he forgets to mention it, Holmes can't consult while he's got the cast. That's the latest version of the liability policy for independent contractors, according to the captain."
"Ah - no wonder he's in such a bad mood. Explains a lot. And thanks for telling me; that's exactly the sort of thing he'd be likely to 'forget' to mention."
When Joan came downstairs the next morning, Sherlock was sitting at the lock room table, clutter pushed to one side, and a spilled cup of coffee pooled next to his resting forearm. He glared at the cast as if it had broken his wrist.
She paused on her way to the kitchen, hands on her hips. "What happened to being ambidextrous?"
He didn't reply but instead reached out with the affected hand to grip the spine of the thickest book on the table as if to spite her - or maybe the universe - before letting it fall with a quickly squelched yelp.
"Keep that up, and you'll not only extend the length of time you have to wear that thing but quite likely give yourself permanent damage. You cannot 'defeat the injury with the power of your will.' Not this injury, anyway. Your scaphoid will not respond well to tough love." She reached over to grab the fallen cup and continued down to the kitchen. When she came back up with two filled cups and a damp dishcloth for the spill, he'd relocated to the study.
He sat with his back to her and shifted awkwardly with his good hand to scoot his chair closer to the desk and hunch toward the center monitor. When she approached to set his cup on the desk, she could see two medical journal articles up on the screen, both about speeding bone growth, one relying on biofeedback and one on electromagnetic fields. She predicted more sensors, wires, and magnets of unusual size in her future, although with the mood he was in, she assumed he'd be more likely to pretend she didn't exist than to demand her help as a lab assistant.
As she turned away, he spoke over his shoulder. "Did you ever have any childhood fractures?" This break was his left arm, same one he'd broken as a kid, though a different bone and not a compound fracture.
She paused in the middle of the room. "Nope."
"Ah." He sounded disappointed.
"I set plenty of them when I worked in the E.R., if that counts."
He shrugged. "I thought perhaps your mother might have medicinal herb experience that could be relevant to bone repair. I've reviewed dozens of studies documenting various western approaches, as well as several focused on acupuncture, but there's much of Chinese medical research only published in Chinese, and my reading ability is insufficient to the task."
"You want to experiment on yourself with methods of increasing bone growth production? What am I saying? Of course you do." She didn't think he would go so far as to break the bone himself for the sake of research. She gave him an appraising look. Probably not. He'd be much less disgruntled about it if he had.
He sighed. "No, I did not orchestrate this injury as a research project. It's simply a matter of making the most of unpleasant circumstances."
"I wouldn't want to presume to know what you'd do for science. And yes, Oren broke his arm when he was ten, and I think my mother might have given him something to help with that. Or it might have been a placebo to stop his whining…" A strategy to consider asking about when she called her mother. "But I can ask. Do you want me to ask?"
He made a noncommittal grunt.
"You know she was in medical school in China, right?"
"I deduced something of the kind. Did she practice? Based on your relative ages and the fact that you were born in this country, I assumed she immigrated before she would have obtained a degree there."
"She never finished. I tried to encourage her to go back when I decided to apply to med school, but she said she was done with medicine." Joan blinked, surprised. She'd forgotten that conversation, and the echo of her own words was an unexpected memory. "Long before that, when I was growing up, she was always chatting up the practitioners she knew. Dragging me along to herb shops and long boring conversations over tea."
"You weren't interested in the subject?"
"Not in third grade I wasn't." She took a sip of her coffee, remembering. "I was going to be a news reporter. Or an actress." He raised his eyebrows. "How about you? You've mentioned you were interested in crime solving by the time you were a teen, but what about earlier? What were you going to be?"
He stared off into space, and she couldn't tell if he was thinking of a reply, or thinking of anything but a reply. After a moment, she shifted in place, and he blinked back from his reverie.
"A problem," he mumbled, and snapped his jaw shut as if surprised he'd said it out loud. She caught his wary glance her way when he turned back to his reading, but she let him retreat from that admission in peace and headed off to the rest of her breakfast.
Over the course of the week, Sherlock demonstrated more ways of being a problem than she knew were possible. He was, in short, a terrible patient. He managed to flood the bathroom every time he attempted to shower without getting his cast wet. Quite a few dishes didn't survive his attempts to balance them one-handed, more often than not still containing enough food or drink to splatter liberally across whatever room he was in. And of course one-armed mopping-up was out of the question.
His left hand was swollen every morning, more than could be explained by the break, although he claimed not to be doing anything to over-use it. She suspected isometric exercises, and it was also possible he was clenching his fist in his sleep. Not that he actually got enough sleep, despite her warning that insufficient rest had been shown to slow down healing processes. She was sure he was in quite a bit of pain, some due to that clenching but most to the nature of the injury itself, and of course the most effective pain medications were off limits. He claimed to be relying on meditation and biofeedback to manage it, but the lines between his brows grew more pronounced, as did the tension across the back of his neck. If his constant short temper hadn't already given that away.
She tried consulting with the NYPD on her own the first week, but the temptation was too much for Sherlock, who couldn't pry himself away from the files she brought home. Then he started texting and calling all day long with suggestions and deductions. The last straw was when he was almost caught stalking the office of the suspect she and Marcus went to question. She stopped going in after that, to her chagrin and his annoyance. "If you would just wear a wire and a camera, I wouldn't need to sneak around," he complained. She went for a long run. A very long run.
At the end of week two he took to wearing long sleeve shirts covering the cast, which eventually proved to be his way of hiding the fact that he'd cracked it doing god knows what. She attempted an admittedly pathetic "Hulk" joke about overdoing it with all the bone growth treatments he was self-administering and the color of his cast, but he didn't know the reference and just stared at her as if she'd grown three sizes and turned green herself.
"The pain generally fades by week three if you haven't aggravated the injury," she made the mistake of saying, trying to change the subject to something more productive than Sherlock's constant fretting. That didn't work either.
"I don't care about the pain, I care about not being able to get anything done!" and she had to put out her hand to stop him from banging the cast on the kitchen table for emphasis.
"Listen, if you want to avoid surgery sooner or arthritis later, stop that! It doesn't take much for a scaphoid fracture to misalign or develop nonunion. You were lucky to avoid that to begin with, but you're pushing that luck acting like this."
He paced angrily back and forth across the kitchen, muttering to himself but getting louder as the rant continued. "There was no reason for me to slip that night. I knew the surface would be slick, and I stayed conscious of my center of gravity and not pushing off my steps. There was no reason for this" and he shook his arm again "and the constant reminder of my ineptitude is trying my patience."
"So you slipped on some ice! Are you annoyed that you fell or just that there were witnesses?"
His face twisted tighter as he bit back another rejoinder and flailed his arm in defeat while turning away. The childish futility of the gesture suddenly made things a little clearer.
"Sherlock, he thought you were being comical on purpose." His shoulders hunched against her conciliatory tone. "When Marcus told me what happened, he compared you to Chaplin." She got a look at that. "He wasn't making fun of you. He was impressed, until he realized you were hurt."
"Well that only casts doubt upon the detective's judgment. And possibly calls into question my own judgment, thinking he had better observational skills than that." He couldn't keep still, edging around the perimeter like a caged panther. Except for a meeting, she didn't think he'd left the house since he was busted trying to sneak into her case. He was even avoiding the bees.
"Okay, the problem here is my mistaken assumption that eventually you could be rational about this." She rubbed her forehead with her thumb and two fingers and breathed in and out slowly. He stopped in front of his room and shifted his weight back and forth from foot to foot, tapping the edge of the cast lightly against the side of his head, waiting.
"Here's the deal. I don't care about your wrist any more. This is about me at my limit. If you don't want me to move out for the duration, stop banging, drilling, slicing, squeezing, or otherwise misusing your cast, as long as your arm is still in it. You want to blow it to smithereens once it's off? I'll hand you the torch. We'll make it a party. Until then, no more destructive behavior. Furthermore, you will keep your arm inside the cast until such time as a certified medical professional declares it's time. And let me remind you, I am not a certified medical professional, so getting me to mumble something in my sleep won't release you from these conditions. Have I made myself clear?"
He contorted his face into a comical grimace and granted her the faintest hint of a nod.
"Good. And now, I'm sick of this place after a week with no cases. I'm going out for pizza. Do you want me to bring a slice back, or do you want to come too?" She stopped herself from insisting he get the hell out of the house. He heaved a sigh as if she'd demanded yet another impossible task. First maturity and now this. "Ice cream on the way back," she added.
"Calcium is good for bone growth," he mumbled after a moment, looking sheepish. "I've been sampling Clyde's supplements, but I suppose I could see how a dairy source compares."
"Two dairy sources, counting the cheese on the pizza. Plus vitamin D if we leave before sunset." she said, heading for the stairs. "Five minutes?"
He was waiting by the front door when she came down from her room, and for the first time in two weeks, she spied the little bounce in his posture as he slipped his phone into his pocket.
"Well, Watson, what do you think about a Buster Keaton retrospective tomorrow night? Weather report looks promising." He pushed the door open for her to pass.
She smiled, and they stepped out into the sunny afternoon.
~fin~
Recipient: monkiainen
Author: amindamazed
Fandom: Elementary
Characters/Pairings: Joan Watson & Sherlock Holmes; Marcus Bell
Rating: Teen
Warnings: None
Summary:
When Joan came downstairs the next morning, Sherlock was sitting at the lock room table, clutter pushed to one side, and a spilled cup of coffee pooled next to his resting forearm. He glared at the cast as if it had broken his wrist.
She paused on her way to the kitchen, hands on her hips. "What happened to being ambidextrous?"
Notes: I'm sure I'll find more typos, which I can easily fix on AO3 without pestering our kind mods, so that's the preferred version to read once the link is added below.
AO3 link: Misadventure
Read on LJ:
They had an impromptu Charlie Chaplin movie marathon up on the roof one unseasonably warm October evening. Three films that Sherlock lectured over the entire time, clearly enthralled by the artistry and artifice of the stunts and effects. Alfredo came over and brought his sister and niece. Marcus showed up half-way through, more than welcome with a bag of tortilla chips and homemade guacamole. It was finally starting to get chilly, and he was particularly impressed that they had a crockpot of hot cider plugged in under the table with the film projector. Joan was impressed that Sherlock hadn't tripped over the extension cord stretching from the stairwell to the table, the way he kept jumping up to point out things Chaplin did.
Nobody seemed surprised they had a film projector, much less actual films to play on it. The Brownstone was like an overstuffed clown car, with an endless parade of unlikely objects spilling out of it. And if any of those items were broken, Sherlock found a way to fix them or to cannibalize them to fix something else. He spent half his sleepless nights tinkering, occasionally with something case-related or, he claimed, likely to be, as with the bomb kits his explosives expert periodically sent him to play with. More often he ended up taking things apart and either putting them back together better or making something entirely new out of them before starting all over again.
Joan sometimes imagined a perpetual motion machine inside Sherlock's head, endlessly spinning and ever ready for something worthy of its power. Something to do. Mental puzzles stimulated and energized him, but physical tasks let his mind rest even as his hands and body worked out a solution. He craved both, and dancing around crime scenes was the best outlet he'd found to channel those means to productive ends. The process of solving the mystery of how and why someone died brought his talents together like nothing else. That he also secretly enjoyed being in the company of crime-solving peers was a bonus he acknowledged only rarely. For all his disdain of social niceties, he enjoyed working with people. She wasn't the first person he'd offered to teach, nor the last. He liked having a partner, someone to appreciate what he did and someone whose contributions he could learn from in turn. If she ever couldn't be there, Joan found some comfort knowing he'd find other companions to do the work with him.
The difficulty came when the process stalled. Usually that happened when there was a lull in NYPD cases. A few notable times of trouble came when his mind snagged on something less than productive: Avenging Irene. Attempting to understand Moriarty. Heroin. All his energy, ingenuity, and dexterity focused on something not only deadly but unworthy of his attention. Not that Joan had much say in the matter. He had the right to send and receive any letters he chose. She didn't have to like it, though.
The few times he'd been sick since she'd known him, he simply pushed through to work, a bit slower than he liked but only held back by lack of energy. The one time he'd been injured before this was when he was shot in the back by Moriarty's mutinous henchman. He pushed through that time too, despite exhaustion and pain (mental and physical) bringing him dangerously close to relapse. Thankfully everything came to a head within a few days, at which point his traditional crash into unconsciousness to make up for days of not sleeping coincided nicely with his shoulder's need to heal.
This time his broken wrist generated a perfect storm of intriguing police cases denied, leaving his energy and focus thwarted, according to him, because of superficial physical limitations blown far out of proportion by paranoid legal patsies. Physical limitations and bureaucratic bullshit, as he charmingly shouted into the phone after Gregson hung up on him and then repeated several more times while ranting throughout the brownstone. Policy and liability requirements conspired to keep him from acting in the public good, shortsighted nonsense that would eventually drive him mad.
Unfortunately, all the other projects he had going at the time required two hands or arms, either for delicate adjustments or bilateral strength or both. None of his cold cases were of any interest whatsoever. None of hers, either, for that matter, and he had the nerve to be insulted when she offered, at which point she left the house for three hours, coming back not when she was ready but when her anxiety over what other bones he might break out of frustration became too strong to ignore. By day fifteen Joan was at wit's end.
The night it happened, Marcus called her from the hospital after realizing she wasn't there because Sherlock hadn't let her know. When Marcus told her it was a simple fracture, that he'd have Sherlock home in an hour so, and she didn't need to rush over, she actually believed him, which is not what would have happened if she'd heard all that from Sherlock himself. She didn't know if that's what Sherlock knew too, or if he had other reasons for keeping it from her.
"He says it's because you'd 'over-react' and demand a full-body cast or induced coma and never leave him alone with your fussing." It was clear from Marcus's soft chuckle that he thought fussing wasn't something she'd tend toward.
"Huh. I'll file those suggestions away for future reference. Might want them by the end of the month, but I'll take my chances with whatever immobilization they gave him for now. Did they let him pick the color?"
When he did get home, Sherlock shoved a large envelope at her as he walked across the lock room to the stairs, and continued down without saying a word. He wasn't wearing a sling but held his arm so the bright green cast crossed his chest. She heard first the single door to his room bang shut, and then the rattle of the french doors closing. Then silence. There was a light tap on the glass of the inner door behind her, and she turned to see Marcus standing just inside the foyer. "The door was open," he said, nodding backwards to the front door, which he pushed closed. "I guess he was in a hurry."
"He's gone down to sulk in his lair, sounds like. I'd offer you something to drink, but I think it's probably better not to venture too close just yet."
"I can't tell if he's mad because he's embarrassed or embarrassed that he got mad."
"What did happen?" She took a look inside the envelope and saw it was the paperwork from the hospital.
"He didn't say?"
"Nope. Didn't call from the hospital and didn't say anything just now. Handed me this," she waved the envelope, "and went straight downstairs without a word; all I know is what you told me on the phone. Fell and broke his wrist."
"Slipped, really. We had to cross an ice rink. We thought it had been drained before it went out of business, but either it hadn't or there was a leak. He charged across like he always does, and then suddenly it was like… Like he was walking on ball bearings." Marcus bit his lip, then cleared his throat. "Um. At first I honestly thought he was showing off. It was…well, it was like a Charlie Chaplin stunt, arms waving like windmills, like in that movie. The way his feet flew out from under him. Then, wham." He winced. "The look on his face - that's when I knew he wasn't fooling."
Although she'd never known Sherlock to joke around like that at a crime scene, she could understand Marcus's mistake. Sherlock was remarkably agile, more than most people she knew. He was often quite graceful zipping around a crime scene when not contorting himself to get his nose closer to things most people would go out of their way to avoid smelling. The one time they'd gone undercover at a fancy-dress event she hadn't been surprised at all when he pulled her onto the dance floor and waltzed her across the room like Fred Astaire in time to catch the security-guard suspect before he slipped out the back. The mishap Marcus described wasn't what she would have expected, even if Sherlock had never gone skating in his life. She considered what little she knew about his childhood. Perhaps he hadn't.
Marcus continued. "The worst part was that he couldn't get up one-handed, so there was a bit more flopping…and, um, flailing. He kept trying to get me to go on ahead, but I couldn't leave him there. And that just pissed him off more. Learned a few colorful British idioms for my trouble."
She made a rueful face. "Sorry about that."
"Hey, not your fault. Not really his, either. I'd probably feel the same if it happened to me."
"But you might choose different words to express your feelings." She forced herself not to look down with the sudden memory of holding Marcus in the street when he collapsed from a gunshot wound to the abdomen. He hadn't uttered a word then. And neither had Sherlock.
Marcus laughed. "Yeah, maybe. Might not be any nicer, though." He kicked up his left foot. "I broke my toe when I was twelve and ended up grounded for swearing."
Joan laughed in turn. "No special dispensation under the circumstances?"
"Not from my mom. To be fair, a zero-tolerance policy was probably the only option, with me and Andre."
"What, you mean you two were trouble-makers? I'm shocked!" She smiled, thinking of the yellowed photo of his mother he had on his desk at the station. "Oren and I tended to set each other up to take the fall. No sibling solidarity for us." She wondered if there'd ever been any camaraderie between the Holmes brothers. Certainly little sign of that now. She sighed, and Marcus stepped back toward the front door.
"Okay, unless you need anything, I'll take off, let you rest up while you can. Just in case he forgets to mention it, Holmes can't consult while he's got the cast. That's the latest version of the liability policy for independent contractors, according to the captain."
"Ah - no wonder he's in such a bad mood. Explains a lot. And thanks for telling me; that's exactly the sort of thing he'd be likely to 'forget' to mention."
When Joan came downstairs the next morning, Sherlock was sitting at the lock room table, clutter pushed to one side, and a spilled cup of coffee pooled next to his resting forearm. He glared at the cast as if it had broken his wrist.
She paused on her way to the kitchen, hands on her hips. "What happened to being ambidextrous?"
He didn't reply but instead reached out with the affected hand to grip the spine of the thickest book on the table as if to spite her - or maybe the universe - before letting it fall with a quickly squelched yelp.
"Keep that up, and you'll not only extend the length of time you have to wear that thing but quite likely give yourself permanent damage. You cannot 'defeat the injury with the power of your will.' Not this injury, anyway. Your scaphoid will not respond well to tough love." She reached over to grab the fallen cup and continued down to the kitchen. When she came back up with two filled cups and a damp dishcloth for the spill, he'd relocated to the study.
He sat with his back to her and shifted awkwardly with his good hand to scoot his chair closer to the desk and hunch toward the center monitor. When she approached to set his cup on the desk, she could see two medical journal articles up on the screen, both about speeding bone growth, one relying on biofeedback and one on electromagnetic fields. She predicted more sensors, wires, and magnets of unusual size in her future, although with the mood he was in, she assumed he'd be more likely to pretend she didn't exist than to demand her help as a lab assistant.
As she turned away, he spoke over his shoulder. "Did you ever have any childhood fractures?" This break was his left arm, same one he'd broken as a kid, though a different bone and not a compound fracture.
She paused in the middle of the room. "Nope."
"Ah." He sounded disappointed.
"I set plenty of them when I worked in the E.R., if that counts."
He shrugged. "I thought perhaps your mother might have medicinal herb experience that could be relevant to bone repair. I've reviewed dozens of studies documenting various western approaches, as well as several focused on acupuncture, but there's much of Chinese medical research only published in Chinese, and my reading ability is insufficient to the task."
"You want to experiment on yourself with methods of increasing bone growth production? What am I saying? Of course you do." She didn't think he would go so far as to break the bone himself for the sake of research. She gave him an appraising look. Probably not. He'd be much less disgruntled about it if he had.
He sighed. "No, I did not orchestrate this injury as a research project. It's simply a matter of making the most of unpleasant circumstances."
"I wouldn't want to presume to know what you'd do for science. And yes, Oren broke his arm when he was ten, and I think my mother might have given him something to help with that. Or it might have been a placebo to stop his whining…" A strategy to consider asking about when she called her mother. "But I can ask. Do you want me to ask?"
He made a noncommittal grunt.
"You know she was in medical school in China, right?"
"I deduced something of the kind. Did she practice? Based on your relative ages and the fact that you were born in this country, I assumed she immigrated before she would have obtained a degree there."
"She never finished. I tried to encourage her to go back when I decided to apply to med school, but she said she was done with medicine." Joan blinked, surprised. She'd forgotten that conversation, and the echo of her own words was an unexpected memory. "Long before that, when I was growing up, she was always chatting up the practitioners she knew. Dragging me along to herb shops and long boring conversations over tea."
"You weren't interested in the subject?"
"Not in third grade I wasn't." She took a sip of her coffee, remembering. "I was going to be a news reporter. Or an actress." He raised his eyebrows. "How about you? You've mentioned you were interested in crime solving by the time you were a teen, but what about earlier? What were you going to be?"
He stared off into space, and she couldn't tell if he was thinking of a reply, or thinking of anything but a reply. After a moment, she shifted in place, and he blinked back from his reverie.
"A problem," he mumbled, and snapped his jaw shut as if surprised he'd said it out loud. She caught his wary glance her way when he turned back to his reading, but she let him retreat from that admission in peace and headed off to the rest of her breakfast.
Over the course of the week, Sherlock demonstrated more ways of being a problem than she knew were possible. He was, in short, a terrible patient. He managed to flood the bathroom every time he attempted to shower without getting his cast wet. Quite a few dishes didn't survive his attempts to balance them one-handed, more often than not still containing enough food or drink to splatter liberally across whatever room he was in. And of course one-armed mopping-up was out of the question.
His left hand was swollen every morning, more than could be explained by the break, although he claimed not to be doing anything to over-use it. She suspected isometric exercises, and it was also possible he was clenching his fist in his sleep. Not that he actually got enough sleep, despite her warning that insufficient rest had been shown to slow down healing processes. She was sure he was in quite a bit of pain, some due to that clenching but most to the nature of the injury itself, and of course the most effective pain medications were off limits. He claimed to be relying on meditation and biofeedback to manage it, but the lines between his brows grew more pronounced, as did the tension across the back of his neck. If his constant short temper hadn't already given that away.
She tried consulting with the NYPD on her own the first week, but the temptation was too much for Sherlock, who couldn't pry himself away from the files she brought home. Then he started texting and calling all day long with suggestions and deductions. The last straw was when he was almost caught stalking the office of the suspect she and Marcus went to question. She stopped going in after that, to her chagrin and his annoyance. "If you would just wear a wire and a camera, I wouldn't need to sneak around," he complained. She went for a long run. A very long run.
At the end of week two he took to wearing long sleeve shirts covering the cast, which eventually proved to be his way of hiding the fact that he'd cracked it doing god knows what. She attempted an admittedly pathetic "Hulk" joke about overdoing it with all the bone growth treatments he was self-administering and the color of his cast, but he didn't know the reference and just stared at her as if she'd grown three sizes and turned green herself.
"The pain generally fades by week three if you haven't aggravated the injury," she made the mistake of saying, trying to change the subject to something more productive than Sherlock's constant fretting. That didn't work either.
"I don't care about the pain, I care about not being able to get anything done!" and she had to put out her hand to stop him from banging the cast on the kitchen table for emphasis.
"Listen, if you want to avoid surgery sooner or arthritis later, stop that! It doesn't take much for a scaphoid fracture to misalign or develop nonunion. You were lucky to avoid that to begin with, but you're pushing that luck acting like this."
He paced angrily back and forth across the kitchen, muttering to himself but getting louder as the rant continued. "There was no reason for me to slip that night. I knew the surface would be slick, and I stayed conscious of my center of gravity and not pushing off my steps. There was no reason for this" and he shook his arm again "and the constant reminder of my ineptitude is trying my patience."
"So you slipped on some ice! Are you annoyed that you fell or just that there were witnesses?"
His face twisted tighter as he bit back another rejoinder and flailed his arm in defeat while turning away. The childish futility of the gesture suddenly made things a little clearer.
"Sherlock, he thought you were being comical on purpose." His shoulders hunched against her conciliatory tone. "When Marcus told me what happened, he compared you to Chaplin." She got a look at that. "He wasn't making fun of you. He was impressed, until he realized you were hurt."
"Well that only casts doubt upon the detective's judgment. And possibly calls into question my own judgment, thinking he had better observational skills than that." He couldn't keep still, edging around the perimeter like a caged panther. Except for a meeting, she didn't think he'd left the house since he was busted trying to sneak into her case. He was even avoiding the bees.
"Okay, the problem here is my mistaken assumption that eventually you could be rational about this." She rubbed her forehead with her thumb and two fingers and breathed in and out slowly. He stopped in front of his room and shifted his weight back and forth from foot to foot, tapping the edge of the cast lightly against the side of his head, waiting.
"Here's the deal. I don't care about your wrist any more. This is about me at my limit. If you don't want me to move out for the duration, stop banging, drilling, slicing, squeezing, or otherwise misusing your cast, as long as your arm is still in it. You want to blow it to smithereens once it's off? I'll hand you the torch. We'll make it a party. Until then, no more destructive behavior. Furthermore, you will keep your arm inside the cast until such time as a certified medical professional declares it's time. And let me remind you, I am not a certified medical professional, so getting me to mumble something in my sleep won't release you from these conditions. Have I made myself clear?"
He contorted his face into a comical grimace and granted her the faintest hint of a nod.
"Good. And now, I'm sick of this place after a week with no cases. I'm going out for pizza. Do you want me to bring a slice back, or do you want to come too?" She stopped herself from insisting he get the hell out of the house. He heaved a sigh as if she'd demanded yet another impossible task. First maturity and now this. "Ice cream on the way back," she added.
"Calcium is good for bone growth," he mumbled after a moment, looking sheepish. "I've been sampling Clyde's supplements, but I suppose I could see how a dairy source compares."
"Two dairy sources, counting the cheese on the pizza. Plus vitamin D if we leave before sunset." she said, heading for the stairs. "Five minutes?"
He was waiting by the front door when she came down from her room, and for the first time in two weeks, she spied the little bounce in his posture as he slipped his phone into his pocket.
"Well, Watson, what do you think about a Buster Keaton retrospective tomorrow night? Weather report looks promising." He pushed the door open for her to pass.
She smiled, and they stepped out into the sunny afternoon.
~fin~