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Joan comes back from her run sweaty and tired and not exactly in the mood to find gorgeous women lounging on her living room couch. There’s one there anyway, though, probably because gorgeous women seem to show up around Sherlock a lot. “Hi,” she says, trying to be friendly anyway. “I’m—”
“Joan Watson,” the woman full on drawls, smiling wide and slow, her teeth showing up a little too brightly against her dark skin. “Sherlock’s roommate.”
“Right,” Joan says after a second. “That’s odd, Sherlock doesn’t usually bother to mention me.”
“Oh, he didn’t,” the woman says, and if anything, her smile gets bigger.
“…Okay,” Joan says. “And you are?”
The woman looks her up and down and smirks. “You can call me Mary,” she says. “Mary Morstan.” She leans forward like she’s imparting a great secret and says, “That’s funny in another universe.”
“Of course it is,” Joan mutters, before pasting a bright smile onto her face. “If you’ll just excuse me for a second?”
The corner of Mary’s—if that is her name—mouth twitches up, and she waves an expressive hand, as if to say, ‘Go ahead.’
“Great,” Joan says, and she goes to find Sherlock.
“Watson!” he says when she walks into the kitchen. “We have a case.”
“Does it have anything to do with the woman in the other room?” Joan says, crossing her arms and leaning against the counter.
“Ah, so you can see her as well,” Sherlock says cheerfully. “Good, that makes me feel much more confident about helping her.”
Joan stares at him. “I’m sorry, was that in doubt? Who is that woman? She told me to call her Mary Morstan because it’s funny in another universe.”
“And doubtless it is,” Sherlock says, completely missing the point.
“Sherlock!” Joan snaps.
Sherlock sighs, putting down a cup he’d been filling with tea and turning to face her. “When I was younger and more impressionable and less sure as to my place in the universe, she briefly turned my life into musical theater for several weeks and then tried to convince me to self-immolate.” He shrugs. “Obviously, I declined. Nevertheless, we have remained in touch, as she is a fascinating individual, and this communication has led her to bring a missing persons case here.”
Joan can feel her mouth open and close like a moron, but— “What?” she finally says.
“To be honest,” Sherlock says, like all of this is just something they do every day, “up until the very moment you said you could see her as well, I was not wholly convinced she was not a figment of my imagination.”
“I’m sorry,” Joan says, “can we go back to the—” She stops. “You know, I don’t even know if I want to go back to the musical theater part or the self-immolation part, but I think we should probably start with the second one. She tried to make you burn yourself to death?”
“In her defense,” Sherlock says, “when I decided against that course of action, while she did try to persuade me to change my mind, she did not force me in any way.”
“Yeah, that doesn’t make that better!” Joan hisses, waving a hand in the air.
“Doesn’t it?” Sherlock says, turning back to the tea. “In hindsight, I rather appreciate her recognition of my agency and the finality of my opinion on the matter. Many people would not have been so considerate.”
“Sherlock, that’s—” Joan takes a deep breath. “This is ridiculous. If you wanted to test my deductive skills, you could’ve picked something a little less insane.”
“On the contrary,” Sherlock says, pressing a mug of tea into her hands, “I am doing nothing of the kind. I assure you, Watson, I am entirely in earnest. Now, shall we go speak with our client?”
“Sherlock,” Joan starts, but as usual, he completely ignores her, grabbing two more mugs and going into the other room.
“Tea?” Sherlock says cheerfully to Mary, who’s still sprawled across the couch like she owns it.
“Sure,” she says, reaching out to grab a cup. “Thanks, Sherlock.”
“Not at all,” he says. “So, you said you’d lost someone?”
“Mm,” she says. “That’s right.”
“Another poor kid you’re trying to convince to self-immolate, maybe?” Joan mutters. “Wow, I wonder where they might have run away to.”
Mary laughs—low, creepy, and unfairly sexy. “Oh, no,” she says. “I’m very good at keeping tabs on them. No, I’ve lost one of my actors. Not one of the important ones, but I do hate to misplace them anyway. It’s very hard to replace people who don’t exactly exist, in the most common sense of the word.”
“So I imagine this actor of yours—male or female, by the way?” Sherlock says, cutting himself off.
“Male,” Mary says, but then she shrugs. “Most of the time.”
“So this usually male actor of yours,” Sherlock says, without missing a beat, “I imagine he doesn’t have any sort of legal documentation?”
Mary snorts. “Of course not.”
“Well,” Sherlock says, “this should be fun.”
Mary gives them a picture, but when she does, she says, “That’s only how he looks usually, of course. Appearance is…fluid for us.” And when Joan inadvertently thinks, So that’s how you got so hot, she smirks like she can hear it.
“Thank you,” Sherlock says, taking it. “Can you tell us anything else useful?”
Mary shrugs and waves a hand, smirking. “He’s very bendy. And strong. You know acrobats.”
“Yeah, that’s not useful,” Joan says.
“I’ve found it to be so in the past,” Mary says—not innocently, but like she’s giving it her absolute worst effort. Like she knows everything she says is starting to sound like innuendo, and she likes it. Joan hates her, and Mary laughs again.
“What?” Joan snaps.
“Oh, it’s just,” Mary says, looking exactly like the often-used cat who got the canary probably does, “this is becoming absolutely hilarious in that other universe.”
Joan really, really hates her.
--
Right as Mary leaves, she says, “If you find anything interesting, let me know.”
“Do you have any contact information?” Joan says tightly.
“Oh, no,” Mary says, smiling. “I’ll just show up.”
Joan slams the door in her face. “She is insane!” she yells. “And probably evil!”
“Why, Watson,” Sherlock says, walking back into the front room with the picture. “I thought you didn’t believe me.”
“Well, I do now,” Joan snaps, following him. She gives it some thought and adds, “Maybe not about the musical theater—”
“Just wait until you do your first number,” Sherlock mutters.
“—but she seems just about crazy enough for everything else.” She sighs, throwing herself down into a chair. “What are we doing taking her case? If you ask me, that acrobat is well shot of her.”
“Perhaps he is,” Sherlock says, pinning the photo up. “But wouldn’t you like to know for sure that he thinks so too? There is always the possibility that he enjoys his job.”
“Enjoys convincing people to commit suicide?” Joan says, frowning.
“There’s a place for us all in this funny world,” Sherlock says. “Or not, as Mary there so endeavored to teach me. While it’s true that my interaction with the chorus was minimal at best, I don’t remember any of them seeming particularly disappointed with their lot. And if he isn’t exactly real, where else is he going to go?”
“You believe that?” Joan says. “That they aren’t exactly real?”
Sherlock sighs. “Joan, for quite some time, that woman literally turned my life into a theatrical production. There were lights, costumes, and a full orchestra. People I’d known all my life sang and danced. At this point, I am quite willing to believe anything she tells me about herself.”
“This is insane,” Joan says flatly, and she goes upstairs to take a shower.
--
“What was that?” she gasps out two days later.
“Are you sorry you doubted me now?” Sherlock says snidely, and Joan has to admit that belting out a showtune with Mary in the brownstone about what they’ve found out about the missing acrobat (zip, zilch, nada) is pretty convincing evidence.
“God, I can’t believe I just sang and danced,” she says, staring up at the ceiling. She thinks about it some more and adds, “I can’t believe I knew the words.”
Mary laughs. Joan could really get to hate that laugh. “You performed fabulously,” she says from where she’s lounging against the fireplace and spinning a baton idly.
And shit, Mary. She supposes it’s only to be expected from some kind of witch demon, but she feels wrung out and over-stimulated, and it’s definitely not from the singing she was doing. Normal people don’t sound like that. If they did, no one would ever be able to get anything done.
And they don’t have bodies like that either. (There was a hula hoop. Nobody should be able to sing while doing that with their hips.)
The worst part is that she’s pretty sure Mary knows, because she keeps flashing those fucking smiles and looking smug and making Joan want to scream.
“What I always wanted to know,” Sherlock says, “is where all the acrobats come from. One second—empty room. Next, full chorus?”
Mary raises her eyebrows. “You’re not more curious about the orchestra?”
Sherlock waves a hand. “Music is largely intangible. People have to come from somewhere.”
“Sherlock,” Mary says chidingly, waving a finger at him. “You know this one.” She strides across the room to stand over him, resting the tip of her baton on his collarbone. “We come from you. From your head. After all—you are extraordinary.”
“We have established that you are not figments of my imagination or hallucinations,” Sherlock says, brushing this off, though he makes no move to actually get her farther away from him. “Watson can see you as well.”
Mary shrugs. “We come from her head, too. We’re right there, in the back of your minds, and sometimes we come out. We’re only ever waiting for you to want us back.”
There’s a pause, and then Joan mutters, “Well, that wasn’t overly dramatic and terrifying at all.”
Mary throws her head back and laughs and laughs and laughs. “I like her,” she says to Sherlock, dumping herself sideways in his lap and throwing her legs over the arm of his chair. “Too bad she was never looking for anything more when she was younger, I’d have visited her and had a fantastic time. She’s too old for a proper show now.”
“I’m sorry,” Joan says, raising her eyebrows and holding up a hand. “You like me, so you wish that when I was younger you’d come to try and convince me to kill myself.”
“Exactly,” Mary says, smiling like she’s pleased Joan’s got it.
Joan stares at her. “And that doesn’t strike you as maybe not quite right?”
Mary throws the baton, watching it arc through the air to land perfectly in the umbrella stand. It has to turn a corner to do it. “No,” she says.
Joan lets out a harsh, exasperated breath. “Of course it doesn’t.”
“I like all my children,” Mary says, shrugging elaborately and letting an arm fall around Sherlock’s shoulders. “I love Sherlock. He’s wonderful, even if he didn’t ever manage to find total fulfilment. Poor baby.” She strokes his hair comfortingly and adds, “And he also robbed me of the perfect end to a brilliant show, the nasty little troublemaker.”
Joan mentally considers changing her categorization from ‘witch demon’ to ‘trickster god.’ Then again, plain old ‘batshit crazy’ is still on the short list. “That’s sweet,” she says sarcastically. “Or it might be if you hadn’t tried to convince him to burn himself to death.”
Mary tilts her head back. “It would have been glorious,” she says, dragging the last word out through her teeth like she can taste it.
Joan suppresses a shiver and looks at Sherlock. “Seriously?”
“I only appear to people who want to see me,” Mary says. “People who want more out of their lives. People who are tired of their tiny, trapped, day-to-day existence.”
“And you convince them to kill themselves,” Joan says incredulously. “Yeah, that’s helpful.”
“If you could possibly save this for later?” Sherlock says, tapping his fingers impatiently on the arm of his chair. “I do believe we still have a missing person to find.”
“Of course,” Mary says, swinging herself back off his lap in one disturbingly fluid motion. “I’ll just get out of your hair.” She blows a kiss at Joan, winks, and sashays out the door.
Real people, Joan thinks bitterly, shouldn’t be allowed to do that with their asses.
The knowledge that Mary Morstan is not exactly a real person does not make her feel better about the situation.
--
Joan wakes up gasping for breath from a dream that she barely remembers, one that’s all heat and dark skin and clever fingers and a laugh that hooks into her and digs in. She sits up straight and looks right into a pair of bright eyes at the end of the bed, and for a second, she thinks she’s still asleep.
She’s not, though, Mary Morstan is really leaning against the end of her bed in a top hat and grinning at her. “Hello, Joan,” she says.
“What the hell are you doing in my room?” Joan hisses.
Mary’s smile widens. “You dreamed about me,” she says, holding out her arms and doing a twirl. “And here I am.”
Joan considers denying it, figures it would be futile, and throws a pillow at her. “Get the hell out.”
Mary laughs, tips her hat, and literally melts into the shadows.
After a long moment spent fuming, Joan goes back to sleep, but she doesn’t dream again.
--
Joan stops short at the threshold of the kitchen the next morning, still in pajamas, and says, “Please tell me I’m still asleep.”
Mary turns around from where she’s making eggs at their stove and cheerfully says, “Nope.”
“And…why are you…?” Joan asks and then waves her hand to indicate—well, everything.
“I thought I’d do something nice for you and Sherlock,” Mary says, turning back to the food. “If you don’t like eggs, I know how to make pancakes as well.”
Joan blinks several times, trying to take that in, and turns away. “Right. Okay,” she mutters. “I’m going to need to be dressed for this.”
--
“Watson, Mary, I think we have a lead,” Sherlock says over the (unfairly good) eggs and pancakes. “One of my many contacts working on the streets places a figure looking very much like the picture you provided over by a warehouse in Queens not long ago.” He pulls out a map and points to a spot, and they both lean over to look. “Can you think of any reason for him to be there?”
Mary shakes her head slowly. “No,” she says. “But I don’t police my actors unless something’s interfering with the show.”
“Worth checking out, in that case,” Sherlock says, reaching over to steal a bite of Joan’s pancake despite still having plenty of his own on his plate.
--
As the taxi pulls up to the warehouse, Mary goes rigid against Joan’s left side. Joan takes a quick glance at Sherlock on her other side and turns back. “Something wrong?” she says tightly.
Mary’s eyes flick to her for a brief moment, and then she smiles, which would be almost convincing if Joan couldn’t feel how tense she is all along where they’re touching. “We should leave,” she says.
Sherlock bends across Joan to stare at her. “We should do nothing of the sort. This is, I’m afraid to say, the first real lead we’ve gotten in this entire investigation. We have to at least look around a little.”
“What is it?” Joan says.
“This place isn’t safe,” she says after a moment. “It’s dangerous. We should leave.”
Joan stares at her. “You’ve been here before.”
Mary shakes her head. “No.”
“Then how do you know?” Joan asks, exasperated.
Mary shrugs carelessly. “I just know.”
“Well,” Sherlock says, after a moment. “Feeling or not, this is a lead, and we can’t afford to lose it. Coming, Watson? Mary, you may wait in the taxi if you wish.”
“Oh, please,” Mary says, rolling her eyes. She throws her door open like she’s making a point. “As if I’d let you two go by yourselves.”
“Why wouldn’t you?” Joan says, following her out.
“Joan,” Mary says seriously, turning and laying a hand on Joan’s shoulder. “I’m hurt. I do really like Sherlock, you know. I don’t want him to get hurt.”
Joan knocks the hand away. “You tried to get him to kill himself.”
“Yes,” Mary says, throwing her arms wide and smiling, all white teeth and charisma. “For the theater!”
“That is such a bad reason,” Joan tells her.
“It’s the only good reason,” Mary says. She winks. “Besides, you’re growing on me.”
Joan sighs, turning away. “God forbid,” she mutters and follows Sherlock, who is ignoring them and already halfway to the door.
“Well,” Sherlock says, once they get inside. “A warehouse. Lovely.”
“And you were expecting…?” Joan says, looking around.
“This is a slightly imaginary actor who participates in slightly imaginary musical theater,” Sherlock says. “Excuse me for expecting something with a little more panache.”
“I agree,” Mary says, nodding. “No style at all. He’s probably not here. Let’s go.”
Joan glances over at her. “It’s not like you’ve made the brownstone any more impressive,” she points out.
“The lighting’s better,” Sherlock says absently, moving around the space.
Joan blinks, her head jerking back a little in surprise. “Really? I didn’t even notice.”
“Really, Watson, we must work more on your skills of observation,” Sherlock says, Mary following him like a particularly sexy shadow. “You practically have a spotlight these days.”
“What can I say,” Mary drawls, “the light loves her.”
“Yes, thank you,” Joan says, rolling her eyes.
Mary raises her eyebrows and looks at Sherlock. “And what have I done this time?”
“I believe she’s still upset about my theoretical self-immolation,” Sherlock says. “Funny how people get about things like that.”
“It would have made you feel fulfilled and given me a perfect finale,” Mary says. “I don’t understand why people don’t see that.”
“Yes, funny how trying to convince my best friend to kill himself for entertainment is still pissing me off,” Joan mutters, looking behind a crate. Across the room, Sherlock drops to his stomach to look at something and pushes himself up again.
“I think we may be barking up the wrong tree,” he calls. “It doesn’t look like there have been people here for quite some time.”
And right then, because that’s how their lives work, a terrified looking man steps out from behind some shelves and levels a gun at Sherlock’s chest. “Who the hell are you and what are you doing here?” he yells.
“Or not,” Sherlock says wryly as they all put their hands in the air. “We’re only here looking for a friend of hers,” he says gesturing to Mary, still standing at his side. “We mean no harm to you.”
The man looks at Mary, and if anything, gets even paler. “She’s not real,” he says. “Who are you people?”
“He can tell?” Sherlock says, and Mary shrugs helplessly.
“Of course I can tell!” the man yells. “What, do you think I’m stupid?”
“No, no, not at all,” Sherlock says soothingly, and then the man fires. From point blank range.
Joan is thirty feet away, but she runs for them anyway, even knowing she’ll never get there in time. She yells something desperate, but then Mary’s arm snaps out in front of Sherlock, and she catches the bullet, her hand making a fist around it. Joan barely has a moment to think, holy shit, is she Superman, before Mary is pivoting to the side, her arm still outstretched, but this time so the back of her fist is facing no one at all. She opens her hand again, the bullet rips through it to embed itself in the wall, and Mary screams, dropping to her knees.
There’s a moment where all the normal humans in the room stop in a unanimous, stunned, cessation of movement. Sherlock recovers first, grabbing Mary’s arm and pulling her up, dragging her towards the door. “Out!” he yells. “Watson, the cab!”
Joan runs, catching hold of Mary’s other arm and helping half-carry her to the door. The man doesn’t fire again, looking after them with in dumb shock, his weapon still up and pointed at where Sherlock had been standing, but they don’t take any chances once they get back to the taxi.
“Hospital!” Joan gasps as they practically fall into the back seat. Mary is half on each of their laps, and she’s pretty sure neither of them could care less.
“Bad idea,” Mary hisses from between clenched teeth.
“Why?” Joan says impatiently as the taxi screeches away from the warehouse. “Are you going to heal instantly like those kids in Teen Wolf?”
Sherlock looks at her incredulously. “Teen Wolf, really?”
“Is now really the time to judge my bad television choices?” Joan snaps at him. “Do you know how many important nerve endings are in the hand? Because I do!”
“Right,” Sherlock says, looking faintly green. “Mary, why can we not take you to hospital?”
“Not real, remember?” Mary whispers, leaning her head back against Joan. “No ID. Definitely no insurance.”
“You can’t conjure some up?” Joan says. “Identification, money, any of it?”
Mary makes a face, biting her lip. “Maybe money. Identification isn’t usually plot point in musical theater, you have to admit.”
“And you can’t do anything not related to theater?” Joan says incredulously, trying to take off her coat without jostling Mary too much. She throws it at Sherlock, who ended up closer to the actual injury. “Pressure.”
“Not as a rule,” Mary says, gasping in pain when Sherlock presses down.
“So no healing?” Joan says.
Mary smiles tightly. “Sometimes I can bring people back from the dead.”
Joan blinks. “Seriously?” Then she backtracks. “Sometimes?”
“That one takes prep work first,” Mary admits, sounding embarrassed about it. “Usually when one of my main characters kills someone, there’s foreshadowing, so I’ve got time. They almost always want them back later.”
“Well, I’m certainly glad I gave you fair warning then,” Sherlock says.
Joan jerks her head up to look at him. “You killed someone?”
Sherlock nods jerkily. “I attempted to become a vigilante. It did not work out.”
“I’ve never had to bring that many people back to life before,” Mary says. “And then, of course, he arrested all of them. Good boy.”
“Who the hell are you people?” the driver says from the front, and Joan groans.
“Let’s make it rain,” Mary murmurs, and she rips the coat away from her hand. Bills that definitely weren’t there before fall out of the folds and she says, “Oh, good, so that does work. Bribe him with that,” and promptly passes out.
--
“I feel like I should thank you,” Joan says when Mary wakes up in the hospital later with a wrapped hand and an apparently shockingly good prognosis.
“Why?” Mary says. Her hair is somehow still creepily perfect. “I didn’t do it for you, I did it for Sherlock.”
Joan thinks about that. “That might have been the best thing you ever could have said to me.”
Mary laughs. “I do care about him, you know. Most of my stars don’t keep in touch like he has.”
Joan snorts. “I imagine they don’t really get the chance.”
Mary smiles lazily. “They don’t all kill themselves, you know. Plenty do, but all? No. Those that don’t usually just have things to do or don’t like me much. Sherlock’s…”
“Special?” Joan tries, but Mary shakes her head.
“I suppose,” she says. “But everyone’s special. I tell my stars they’re extraordinary, and they are, but most of them never realize that everyone else is, too. The nurse just outside, the receptionist who took your paperwork, our taxi driver, the bum halfway down the street, the crying girl in the next room whose father just died. You.”
Joan looks away. “What’s Sherlock, then? What were you going to say?”
Mary’s silent so long Joan almost turns to check if she’s gone back to sleep, but then she says, “More open minded, I think. About a lot of things.”
--
“So, do you hate her less now?” Sherlock says, getting coffee with her at the crappy hospital cafeteria.
“Saving your life was reasonably impressive,” Joan says, refusing to look at him. “I’m giving it some thought.”
Sherlock ‘hmms’ thoughtfully, but for once in his life, doesn’t push it. “We shall need your coat again,” he says instead.
“What?” Joan says, turning. “Why?”
“Well, it contains the blood of someone who is at least partly a figment of our collective imagination and can briefly halt the flight of bullets,” Sherlock says, his eyes lighting up. “I can’t wait to do experiments on it.”
“Sherlock!” Joan snaps. “Don’t you think it’s a little insensitive to be thinking about that now?”
“Why?” Sherlock says, striding back towards Mary’s room. “She’s going to be all right, isn’t she?”
“Yes, but,” Joan says, but then she gives up. “You know, I’m starting to see why you two get along so well.”
--
After the few days Mary spends in the hospital (which she pays for by putting her sheet onto a table, flicking it off again, and saying, “Voila!”), she all but moves into the brownstone. She lies on the couch, smirking and ordering them around.
“You know, your legs work fine,” Joan says, but not nearly as bitterly as she would have before.
“I know,” Mary says cheerfully. “I just like watching you do things for me.”
Joan rolls her eyes, but she also actually laughs and then has to walk away to be very confused about things somewhere else.
--
Mary gets to be such a fixture as they continue to try (unsuccessfully) to solve her case, this time after stealing vests from the police department (Sherlock swears they won’t mind when he presents them to her, Joan sighs and calls Gregson to apologize), that when Joan walks into the front room and she isn’t there, she panics a little bit. After running all over the house looking for her, she eventually finds her on the roof, sitting in Sherlock’s chair and watching the bees.
Joan watches her for a while, confident that Mary both knows she’s there and doesn’t mind. People probably stare at her all the time. She’s certainly very hard to look away from. “You like bees?” she says at last.
Mary looks over her shoulder, smiling, and stretches her legs out in front of her. “That’s right,” she says. “Look at them. They’re like a particularly well-choreographed dance number where everyone is a member of the chorus.”
“No stars,” Joan says. “How would you end a show like that?”
Mary laughs. “You couldn’t have a show like that.”
Joan thinks about it. “I guess not.”
Mary grins at her. “Still judging me for trying to convince young, impressionable, hopeless people to kill themselves for art?”
Joan sighs. “Well, I can’t say I like your day job much.”
Mary waves her hand as if to say, ‘c’est la vie,’ and nods at the other chair on the roof. “Care to join an insane and probably evil woman?”
Something about that rings a bell, and Joan thinks about it as she sits down. When it finally hits her, she bursts out laughing and says, “Were you listening when I slammed the door on you that first time?”
“Of course,” Mary says. “I’m honestly hurt that you thought I might not have been.”
Joan laughs again. “So, not entirely real,” she says. “What does that mean, exactly?”
Mary shrugs minutely, tilting her head to the side. “It means what you think it means. Whatever you think it means.”
Joan considers that for a while, finally saying, “So you really are a figment of our imaginations, like Sherlock’s been thinking.” She’s unaccountably disappointed by that.
Mary ‘hmms’ and shakes her head. “Consider me a…figment of the collective world’s need for something greater than itself.”
“That’s different?” Joan says, eyeing her.
“Call it more likely to stick around,” Mary says. “Unless you think the world is going to stop wanting its life to be a fairytale anytime soon.”
“No, I don’t see that one happening,” Joan agrees. “So, you deal in wish-fulfillment?”
Mary gives her a very amused and patient look. “You didn’t realize that one before?”
“I was kind of focused on the death part,” Joan tells her, and Mary sighs.
“Of course you were,” she says.
--
When Joan wakes up that night, she’s not entirely surprised to see Mary’s eyes at the end of her bed, just looking at her.
“You were dreaming of me again,” she says unnecessarily. “Would you like me to leave?”
Joan looks at her. No top hat or baton this time, just Mary. Black vest, black pants, one hand on her hip, and Joan wants her so badly it hurts. “No,” she says, and Mary gives her the best smile yet.
“Good,” she says, and she crawls up the bed to straddle Joan and meet her in a bruising kiss.
“Out of curiosity,” Joan says when they break apart, “how is this looking in that other universe?”
Mary stares at her and then cracks up, falling to the side and literally shaking with laughter. “I forgot about that,” she says once she’s managed to get herself under control. “But you have no idea.”
--
The first thing Sherlock says when he sees her the next morning is, “Watson! Congratulations on your coitus last night.”
Joan’s mostly expecting it, so all she says is, “Thanks.”
“I’m glad you and Mary are getting along better,” he says. “It makes for a much more pleasant working environment.”
“I’m sure you are,” Joan says, accepting a cup of coffee and resolving to put up with the teasing.
“What is that they say about a fine line?” he muses. “I really feel as if we ought to be playing the soundtrack to Wicked here,” and he starts humming “What is This Feeling,” because he’s a bastard.
“Oh, shush, Sherlock. You know how I feel about other people’s musicals, though at least that one is definitely my style,” Mary says, walking into the kitchen and dropping a kiss onto Joan’s cheek.
“Ah, Mary,” Sherlock says. “Congratulations to you as well, of course.”
“Thank you,” Mary says, sliding into the seat next to Joan. “Now, how’s that case going? I’m eager to acquire more bullet holes, you know. One in my other hand and in each foot and I’ll look like Jesus. Now there was a man who knew how to commit suicide. What a show.”
Joan tries to stifle her entirely inappropriate laughter in her coffee cup and pretends she can’t feel Mary’s foot drawing idle figure eights on her leg. “Be quiet,” she says, once she can talk without giggling.
Mary smirks at her. “Make me.”