#quarto's fics

The girl raised her eyebrows and made a face at him, then went to look for a stone of her own.  

“The water is too turbulent here,” he said.

The girl kept looking, until she found a smooth white stone, really too large for the purpose, being almost the size of her palm.

“It calls for a calmer day than this,” he said.

Then the girl drew back her arm and lobbed the stone, which skimmed perfectly, touching the water five times before sinking into the water of the bay.  Because of course it did.

“If you want to skip rocks in this kind of water you need to pick a bigger one and kind of… loft it over the breakwater.  Just like that,” she said, waving vaguely at the sea.

“Skim stones.”

“What?”

“Here we call it skimming stones.  Not skipping rocks.”

“And it’s pech blini in Russia and hacer ranitas in Spain.  We didn’t pitch your tea into Boston Harbor just to keep doing everything the same way you did.”

The words were bellicose but for once he was able to pick up on the tone, and when he looked through the ringlets that the breeze was blowing into her face, he could see that she was pinching her lips together to keep from smiling.

“I remember,” he said, slowly, “The great skimming stones debate that provoked the revolution.  We learnt all about it at school.  That’s why we burnt down your White House.  That and your willful mispronunciation of aluminium.”

The girl burbled a laugh, and it was not as unpleasant as it mostly was when girls laughed.  The “with” not “at” made all the difference.

Because he was eighteen years old and still desperately trying to pass for normal, Sherlock said, “I’m Will.”

She was twenty-one, and Mary Morstan and the rest of her pseudonyms were well into the future.  So because it was the simple truth, she said, “I’m Rose.  Nice to meet you, Will.  I can teach you how to skip rocks properly if you want.  Though it’ll wreck your attempt to look all Byronic and interesting.”

Sherlock frowned, though he wasn’t quite sure what Byronic meant, honestly.  “I wasn’t trying to look like anything.”

“Oh come on.  Alone, staring out over the sunset sea, the wind ruffling your hair.  Very ‘Adieu, Adieu, my native shore.’”

“This is my native shore, I just wanted to look at the tide pools.  Anyway, why are you here?”

“I,” she said, grandly, “Am way too close to shitfaced and I need to take a break for an hour.  And I thought you looked Byronic and interesting.  Where are there tide pools?”

He angled his head to their right.  “Back that way.  Maybe half a mile.”

“Let’s go see them!”

“I’ve seen them.  And you aren’t wearing the appropriate shoes for climbing.”

Rose looked down at her cheap flip-flops, shrugged, and said, “God hates a coward.  Come on.”

~

They’d looked at the tide pools, and Rose hadn’t complained as they scrabbled over rough Purbeck stone to get to them.  Being a small woman, she’d asked for a hand up on two occasions, but she didn’t complain, and she was genuinely interested in the sea slugs and anemones they found.

Then they’d moved on to another section of swimming beach, and now she was trying to teach him to skip rocks.

“Oh!  You almost had that one,” she exclaimed, as his latest effort sank.

“What sort of trajectory am I trying for?” he asked.  “It really isn’t obvious.”

“Ummmm…” and she pitched another stone, which made four hops before sinking.  “I mean, I guess, like fifteen or twenty degrees.  But it depends on the rock.”

“Well, that’s helpful.”

“You just take the rock and then you know how you have to throw it.  It’s mostly practice.”

“You’re very good at it.”

“It’s what I’m best at,” she said, and the next stone made six skips before it sank.  “You got a projectile and need it put someplace specific, I’m your girl.”

“Really?”

“Really.  What are you best at?”

He thought about it for a minute. 

“Deductions.  That’s what I’m best at.”

“Like… in geometry?  If AB equals BC then A equals C?”

“Sort of.  But it’s not just that.  I can do it for other things.  And people.”

“How?”

“Just like in geometry.  You use if-then logic and come to the appropriate conclusion.  Except most people aren’t aware of all of the givens, and I am.”

“O-kay,” she said, slowly, “So, like, what can you deduce about me?”

He cocked his head, doubtfully, and asked, “You want me to do that?”

Rose shrugged.  “Why not?  What have I got to hide?”

Sherlock wished he hadn’t mentioned it, now.  It would spoil what had been a surprisingly pleasant afternoon. She was only asking because she’d never seen him do it… nobody really wanted his deductions.  Everyone had something to hide.  

But she had asked and declining would be nearly as offensive, he supposed.  So he let himself really look.  Excessive dark-blonde hair, no jewelry, black midriff-baring top with thin straps and no bra (irrelevant, he chided himself), well-developed lean musculature particularly in the shoulders.  Mid-priced wide-legged flared jeans clumsily home-hemmed, since she fell between the “petite” and “regular” lengths.  He walked behind her, continuing his examination, and smiled.  The grey plaid flannel shirt she had knotted around her waist had a great deal of relevant information.  

Returning in front of her, he asked, “May I have a look at your hands?”  Rose complied, extending them forward, palms up.  Her hands, with their emerald-green fingernails and distinctive musculature, had almost everything else he thought he could get, except-

“And a better look at the tattoo, please?”

Rose smiled and raised an eyebrow at that, but complied, slipping a thumb under the waistband of her jeans and tugging them down another inch or two to reveal a small, stylized design of a leafless tree struck by lightning (and incidentally a crest of pale hipbone and just a flash of red plaid underwear).

“Satisfied?” she asked.

“Entirely.”  And Sherlock was.  

“So what do you deduce?”

“Not much, I’m afraid.  You’re an American-“

“Well that was a toughie,” Rose teased.

“From Iowa.  You’re a natural linguist but you’re studying chemistry.  You played softball seriously, as a pitcher, until a rotator cuff injury which you opted not to have corrected bought your sporting ambitions to an end within the last year.  Upper middle class family, strict parents.  You currently live with a wire-haired terrier you dislike, you’re sentimental, and you’re a keen amateur cook.”

And that had done it, of course.  Her face, which had formerly seemed naturally happy, had closed off and become hostile.  She took a step away from him, and said, coldly, “Has Victor been talking about me behind my back?”

“You know Victor Trevor?” Sherlock asked.

“Everybody knows Victor.  Answer the question.”

“No, he hasn't. I told you.  I looked and I listened.  Teeth straightened in adolescence, a selection of newish mid-priced clothes, spending a semester abroad?  Well off but probably not rich family, then.  You know, at no notice, idiomatic phrases in two separate languages describing an unusual activity?  Clearly, there’s a gift for languages.  The mild splay of the fingers in your dominant hand and unusual muscular development in your shoulders, along with your obvious aptitude for throwing suggests softball and pitching.  The slight pull and hesitation when you draw that arm back would allow any doctor to diagnose a rotator cuff injury, a career-ending one without surgical correction, and yet you lack scars.  Thus softball is over.”

Rose cocked her head and looked at him, but at least the anger was gone.  So he continued.

“There’s particularly contoured dog hair common to wire-haired terriers on your jeans, meaning it’s fond of you, but none on your shirt, meaning you don’t pick it up, and you aren’t fond of it.”

“Marco’s a drooler and he scratches.  Anyway I’m more of a cat person.”

“Cats eat you after you’re dead.  They don’t even wait until they’re starving, just mildly peckish.”

“True, but on the other hand, I’m dead in this situation.  So who cares?”

Sherlock nodded slowly, “Very practical.  You’ve got enough minor knife and burn injuries to your hands to suggest you spend a lot of time cooking but your forearm development isn’t substantial enough to indicate professional work in the field.  I can tell you study chemistry because of the marks on your shirt.  They never properly clean the lab benches off and you lean into the edges and get some trace amounts of peroxide or acid on the material… which then produces distinctive straight lines of bleaching the next time the shirt is laundered.  I have some of the same ones, see?”

He gestured to his trousers, where the bleaching effect occurred on him, given his greater height.  

“Huh,” Rose said, “I never really thought about that.  So why Iowa?”

“Ah, I was right!”

“Not really.  Nebraska.  But just across the river from Iowa.”

Sherlock sighed.  “Accents are difficult with anyone young enough to have watched television as a child.   But the Iowa accent is marked by monopthongs and “T”-glottalization, and you have it.”

“I have no idea what those things are,” Rose said, musingly, “But since most people around here think New York and L.A. are the only two cities in America that’s actually really good.”

Sherlock felt the blood rushing to his face with pride, and so he kept on, “You’re sentimental because that flannel is battered and you’ve fixed three different tears rather than just discarding it, even though it was never terribly expensive.”

“I saw Nirvana in this shirt.”

Sherlock frowned, wondering if she meant she was Buddhist, and then recalled the band.

“That tattoo,” he wrapped up, “Is a Marius Cook, done about five months ago.  I’ve made a bit of a study of the major tattoo artists of the United Kingdom, you’d be surprised at how often it’s useful. You’ve been of legal age to get tattooed for some time but waited until you were well away from home and then did it instantly but kept it someplace easy to hide, thus: strict parents.”

~

It was dark, now, and someone had pulled out a guitar and was strumming amateurish chords.  Sherlock and Rose had looked at one another and, in a moment of pure intoxicated understanding

~

The semen had more or less dried on her thighs by the time Rose decided that Will wouldn’t be back, even to collect his shirt.  She sighed and rubbed her stubble-burned face.  Then she pulled on her underwear and jeans, and sat and looked up at the stars, which were slightly more mobile than they ought to have been.

She’d liked him.  He wasn’t handsome, but five years and twenty pounds of weight gain would probably have made him so.  And he was sweet.   Clumsy and inexperienced, yes, but intelligent and fun to talk with… essentially, she’d been very happy with the encounter and now she felt…

Cheap.  Which was undoubtedly what her mother would have said about anyone who fucked a man who she’d just met and was expecting to never see again.  So Rose had a bit of a self-pitying snivel, and cried about her troubles.

Eventually her natural good humor resurfaced (she had the beneficial confidence of someone who had taken a birth control pill every day for the last three years) and she said, smiling to herself, “Jilted by a gentleman.  If I can get ruined and discarded by a redcoat I can  have my own Gothic novel.”

 She collected the blanket and Will’s shirt, then ambled back to the party, which was still in full swing, although the Oxford contingent seemed to have gone.  Her flatmate Magda spotted her and called out, “There you are, you whore.  Where’d tall dark and skinny run off to?”

“I think I frightened him away,” Rose replied, lightly, “English boys are all prudes.  Are there any more of those screwdrivers?”

Magda gestured wildly at the five gallon drinks cooler behind her.  “About half.”

“Good.  About half sounds just about right.”  And she wadded Will’s shirt up, tossed it into a nearby rubbish bin, and poured herself a drink.

~

They both forgot all about it.  The vodka helped Rose do a great deal of this within the first twenty-four hours.  Then there was the fact that Byronic-and-interesting Will was neither the first nor the last of a long string of men that would eventually span four continents, some of whom would disappoint her in far more spectacular fashion.  By the time she buried Rose and became Mary, she could skim stones without even vaguely recalling that summer afternoon.  

Sherlock didn’t forget much, and so deleting Rose took an effort of willpower.  He performed a few subsequent experiments with sex and came to the conclusion that it was unlikely to be productive of any good and indeed, subjected him to undesirable sentimentality.  Cocaine was a far more efficient euphoric and asked much less of him, in the end.  The choice to purge his files on the subject en masse was therefore simple logic and had nothing to do with wishing to shed the recollection of a callow, prematurely-ejaculating version of himself.  

When, much later, he plugged the memory stick marked AGRA into his laptop and began reading the files, the name Rose Addison didn’t stir even the faintest reminiscence.

~

“Oh no.  Oh my God, you’re-  You died!  You jumped off a roof!”

Age, eventually, makes mockeries of all of us.  When I was in my sixties and seventies, I discovered that I did in fact have a heart. And a pancreas.  And many joints, none of which seemed to want to work together properly anymore.  And several other failing body parts that required me to take a dozen pills every single day of my life.

None of this happened to Sherlock.  He remained more or less exactly as he’d always been, just craggier.  He kept his hair, and when it changed color it started in elegant wings over his temples then became a flattering overall silver. Meanwhile I discovered that even once I gave up on blonde, I would have to keep coloring my hair, since it was an unattractive yellowish grey when left to its own devices.

Despite my array of minor ailments, our life together was… good.  We split our time between the Sussex downs, where his bees were, and London, where our grandchildren were.  He took cases, but only the most interesting ones.  I wrote my novels, but only every three years, instead of the annual volumes I’d churned out in my prime.  Sherlock wrote a practical handbook on beekeeping and was furious that nobody wished to buy it.

It was a snowy winter afternoon in Baker Street, and he’d just come in from the cold.  He was flushed and excited to tell me all about what he’d been up to since he’d been gone for a week: a commonplace-seeming garroting that had led to the discovery of an active human-sacrifice cult with multiple sites across Europe.  I vaguely considered putting it into a story but decided it was so wildly implausible that even my extremely patient readers wouldn’t believe it.

“Oh, you should have seen it, Mary!” he exclaimed, “There I was, tied to the altar below the statue of Czernobog, and the priest was saying the chant and holding the rope over my head, when all at once the door burst open and-“

He paused, then, and said, “Oh, hell.  What’s his name?  The detective inspector?  Amelia’s boss?  Black, muscular, gay?”

“Ted Gregson.”

“Yes.  Right.  Him.”

He didn’t continue on, but flung himself into chair and stared into the fireplace.  I prodded, “So then what happened?”

“I believe something’s gone wrong with my mind, Mary.”

I rolled my eyes at that. For someone who was always as healthy as a horse he was a terrible hypochondriac.

“You had a senior moment. Anyway you never used to remember Greg’s name either… you may have some sort of block for DIs.”

“No.  This is something different.  And it’s been going on for a while.”

Sherlock was right. He mostly was.  Like a lot of intelligent people, he’d been able to compensate for the earliest stages, but he was right.  After that, the progression seemed terribly fast.  We spent several months in a haze of scans and therapy, and he accumulated enough prescription bottles to rival my own collection.  Some of them were highly experimental and provided by his brother’s network of mysterious scientists.  None of them really seemed to do much.

Amelia, being the dear that she is, volunteered to take us in when it all started getting too much for me to handle by myself.  But she had three young children and a husband to look after, a hugely busy career with the Met, plus far too many stairs for me to manage every day.  Therefore I sold the house at Baker Street for an obscene amount of money to a city stockbroker, and we moved out to the downs for what I knew would be the last time.

I’ve spent my life moving on and leaving things behind me.  I’d dropped the original version of myself with no real regrets.  I’d quit my first two careers, both of which I’d been proud of and enjoyed.  I’d managed to get through the death of a husband who I had loved so much that even thirty years later it still hurt to think of him.  So it’s silly how many tears I shed over that dingy Georgian money pit.  

But the cash I got for the place was very helpful.  Despite the continuing success of the Jim Winston novels and the fact that Sherlock had softened up on taking dull cases for money as he aged, we weren’t exactly rich. Then, too, we had new expenses.  I had to hire a nice young woman to help me look after the house, and a large young man to keep an eye on Sherlock in the evenings, since he tended to want to wander after dark.

Then I had to hire another nice young woman because Sherlock had deduced that the original one was unfaithful to her husband, and had of course done it to her face.  Then another large young man since Sherlock, who took a while to experience any of the physical debility that comes with Alzheimer’s, got confused and shoulder-threw the first one across the lounge one evening. At a certain point I arranged for a local hippie couple to come by and look after the bees in exchange for the honey.

We carried on for a few years.  He had his good days and his bad ones.  On his good days he’d still consult, by email, since he had a rock-hard certainty that England couldn’t get by without him.  I published “The Mountain of Fear,” which sold as well as any of my books but as always was savaged by the critics for popularist dreck.  

I started work on my next novel and got about a quarter of the way through it.  Then one day I realized that it was likely that it would be the last one I ever had time to write, and that after it was done, there would be no more Jim Winston stories.  I could face not writing it, but I couldn’t face a world where John, even a fictionalized and imaginary John, wasn’t around, and so I put the MS in a drawer in my desk and turned the key.  “Caught in transition from imagination to life” was the best epitaph I could have written for him, with my limited abilities.

We had fewer and fewer good days.

On a brilliant indian summer day, I went to London to have a new and complicated type of bone scan that couldn’t be done locally.  This was mostly uneventful, although we incidentally discovered that I had finally shrunk to the point where I was less than five feet tall.  The nurse said the radiologist would look over the films and be in touch in the next few weeks.  I took Amelia to lunch and we talked about the grandchildren, mostly, and she promised to bring them out for a visit at the weekend.  Then I took the train back home- I still drove, but didn’t care to do it in the city any more.  

When I got back from the station, there was a long black town car parked on the gravel drive in front of our house.  The driver, a lovely young woman and obviously a Secret Service agent, was leaning on the hood smoking a cigarette.  She nodded politely to me as I passed by.  I therefore was not surprised to see Sherlock’s brother sitting in the kitchen, drinking tea.  He shared the Holmes tendency for turning up where he wasn’t expected.  

Or wanted.  

Like his brother, he was well-preserved physically, though in the case of Mycroft the adjective “mummified” always seemed more appropriate.  He had to be nearly ninety but his eyes were as bright and judgmental as they ever had been.  He nodded to me as Vithnya, the second housekeeper, helped me out of my coat.  

“Mycroft.”

“Mary.”

We weren’t ever particularly friendly.  He’d never trusted me, and had verbally disapproved of my relationship with Sherlock until it was so well-established that it had become a pointless gesture on his part.  For my part, I despised the constant needling that was his preferred method of interaction with his younger brother.  To the best of my knowledge he and Sherlock hadn’t met in person for nearly three years.

Even with all that, it was oddly relaxing to talk to him.  We were both such skilled and professional liars that we never bothered trying it out with one another.

“How’s he done since I was out?” I asked Vithnya.

“Pretty well.  He had a nice chat with Mr. Holmes – with Mr. Mycroft Holmes, that is - and now he’s out with his bees.  But he was a little agitated this morning.  He kept walking around looking for someone called Angela.”

I could feel Mycroft’s eyes boring in to me over the rim of his teacup.  I smiled at the girl and said, “He was looking for me.  It’s an old joke we used to have.”

She giggled, and I realized abruptly that she was relieved, that she’d worried I’d be hurt that my husband, in his confusion, wanted to see another woman.  This was a thought that was so ridiculous on so many levels that I could have giggled myself.

Vithnya grinned, white teeth in her red lips, and said, “I don’t know about that.  This Angela sounds like a most desperate character!”

“I was quite the firecracker when I was younger, my girl.  Can you keep an eye on him while I chat with Mycroft, please?”

She poured me a cup of tea of my own and went off to do just that.

Mycroft said, “You don’t seem at all nervous of discovery now that Sherlock has lost what - minimal filters - he ever had.”

“I’m not.”

“No statute of limitations on murder.”

I rolled my eyes at him. He was the one, after all, who had replaced my rather half-assed false identity with something that could stand up to any scrutiny.

“She won’t think about it for more than thirty seconds after leaving this room.  I am a little old lady.  In the mind of a twenty-two year old, not only am I obviously harmless now but it is inconceivable I ever would have been otherwise.  You ought to consider hiring some of us on at MI-6. We’re practically invisible.”

“Perhaps I ought.”

I took a biscuit, damn my blood sugar, and dunked it into my tea.  

“Did you and Sherlock have a nice chat?” I asked.

He didn’t answer right away.

“We did,” he said, eventually, “For seventy-eight minutes.  Not once in that period did he recognize me.  I could tell he was making his best deductions.  Sometimes he thought I was John Watson.  Sometimes Greg Lestrade, sometimes Victor Trevor.  I didn’t realize-”

“Didn’t realize what?”

“That he had become so debilitated.  That he was so far gone.”

I sighed.  

“He’s dying, Mycroft. What did you think it would be like?”

He took another biscuit from the packet on the table and put it into his mouth.  Chewed.

“I never thought that he would be the first to go.  I always assumed that I wouldn’t be the one left standing.  When he’s gone-”

He trailed off.  But I could read his thoughts as clearly as if they’d been my own.  When Sherlock was gone there would be no one left with the same sort of mind that Mycroft had… except the departure had already happened, and he’d missed it.

I had some sympathetic pangs – for Mycroft Holmes, of all people – and I said, “He generally perks up a bit in the evenings.  I’m happy to put you up, if you’d like.  Perhaps you could… try again?”

The British Government responded as I should have expected.  He rose, brushed nonexistent crumbs off his lapels, and took up his hat and umbrella.  

“I think that my presence is of no help to him any longer, Mary.  I expect that I will see you again.  At least once.”

He actually bowed to me on his way out.

I finished my tea, and looked out of the window.  Vithnya was sitting in the grass, folding a basket of laundry.  Sherlock was sitting on the bench that looked out over the garden. Both of them seemed contented, at least as far as one could tell from that distance.  The sun was at a deep angle, and so I picked up a blanket and left for the outdoors.

I was glad I had done, as it was starting to get chilly outside and he was in shirtsleeves.  Had I married any other man but this one I would have thought that his indifference to the elements was a sign of his decay, but frankly he’d done the exact same thing when he was forty.  “Just transport,” is the motto he maintained, in far worse weather than this.

At some point in his life someone, presumably his mother, drilled some basic forms of politeness into Sherlock Holmes.  He was terrifyingly, frankly rude in ordinary conversation but when you handed him a cup of tea or tucked a blanket around his body you would inevitably receive a gracious, “Ah, thank you.”  It’d be in the tone of a king addressing his subjects, but you’d get it.  I got just that as I settled the afghan around his knees, and sat down next to him to look over the hives.  

“I’m expecting John and Mary to turn up.  Have you seen them?” he asked me.

When he’d first become ill, he’d asked me to always correct him when he had his lapses.  I’d agreed, but, again, I was such a natural liar that it didn’t much trouble me to say now that, “I believe they’ll be along shortly.” Awful, I know, but sometimes I just wanted not to see him upset.

“Ah,” he replied.

A drone, a late survivor of the autumnal purges, buzzed up and landed on the blanket over his knee. He gently nudged it onto his hand and raised it to eye level before setting it down on the ground.

“I’m a bit worried,” he said, conversationally.

“About what?” I asked.

“Occasionally John’s wife lets me shag her.  And I’m not sure that’s right.”

I blinked. Occasionally?  Thirty-odd years, and I’m not going to go into details about our sex life but it was really very acceptable, and occasionally is what he remembered?  And that I ‘let him’?   But all I said was, “I’m sure Mary wouldn’t do that if John objected. So it’s all right.”

“Ah, good.  You know Mary, then?”

“I do, yes.”

He squinted at me, which, Gawd-help-us, was still terribly cute.

“You’re… one of her relatives,” he said, hesitantly.

I smiled.  “I am,” I said, “How did you know that?”

He grinned at me.  No matter what he’d ever said or how much he’d griped about the unobservant nature of most people, I knew that he loved to explain his deductions.  

“It’s the ears,” he said, setting the pads of his fingers on my chin and turning my face to the side, “Not quite as uniquely identifying as a fingerprint but with a strong genetic component.  The pendulosity of the lobes, the position of the pinnae… clearly you and Mary are closely connected.  You’re too old to be the younger sister, and the mother is dead, but..”

He took hold of my hand and looked at my fingers.  “There’s other things.  You and Mary both have a minor congenital deformity of the smallest finger.  It angles slightly outward.  Not enough to disable either of you, but distinctive, and…”

He turned my hands in his. I have nearly perfectly matched scars on my palms… on my right hand, the souvenir of a Caracas knife fight when I was twenty-seven.  On my left, the souvenir of reaching into a sink filled with dishwater and one broken glass when I was forty.  

And then he stopped, still staring at my hands, and said, “Oh.  Oh Mary.  How could I have forgotten you?  I had you off by heart.”

I lifted a hand and stroked his grizzled chin.  

“It’s fine,” I said, “You have me back.”

He just tangled his fingers in mine and stared.

“That’s my mother’s ring,” he said.  “Did I give that to you?”

I looked at the amethyst on my right ring finger and said, “Yes.  When we got married.”

“I remember that.  You were beautiful in your dress.”

I laughed, unwittingly. “That was my first wedding.  You and I just went to a registry office at two in the afternoon on a Tuesday.”

“Really?”

“We did. There wasn’t much time to plan a wedding.  The exact words of your proposal were, “If I have to be Sir Sherlock you can damn well be Lady Mary.”  It was the day before you got your KCBE.”

“By God.  What a rubbish proposal.”

I smiled.

Yes, yes.  Christ, yes.  

So tight, so wet.  Clinging to your cock as you thrust.

Fuck it, you’re going to come.  

Good plan.  You can make it up afterwards by going down on her, which won’t be particularly pleasant but will get the job done, but you will come, and it will be inside her, and it will be incredibly good.

Except.  Except except except.

Remember how kind and understanding she’s been on the occasions when premature ejaculation has occurred.

Bloody Molly Bloody Hooper is always so nice and kind and understanding.

Molly Molly Hooper Hooper god damn her.

Look at how cute she is.  Look at those soft little breasts bouncing as she cries out her pleasure beneath you.

Think of sport statistics and delay orgasm that way.

Bugger.

Okay, just try thinking of A Sport.  They certainly... exist, right?  You did some of them at school.  There’s one with a bat.  Not the flying rat type of bat, but a... shaped stick of wood.  Of some sort?

Nope, not occurring at the moment.

Bugger.

All right, time for professionalism.  You have hands.  Clitoris is literally right there, though it’s slightly awkward to get said hands to it between the bellies but you are the world’s only fucking consultant detective you can probably figure something out.

Oh there we go.

Molly Molly Hooper Hooper.

Hello.

---------------------------------------------------------------

Molly curled into his side, sweaty but just a bit too sleepy to go shower quite yet.

“Really ninety-seven percent?  During?” she asked into Sherlock’s chest.

“I do have to maintain the autonomic nervous system functioning.”

“It wasn’t actually a complaint.  That’s ample.  And then what happens?”

“Well,” Sherlock was actually blushing, this was the best thing ever, “Right... after?  You drop down to near zero.  That’s Sherlock time.”

She had actually noticed the immediate post-coital feral state, though she hadn’t mentioned it before now.

“And then over the course of the next... say thirty minutes?  You creep back up to baseline levels.”

Molly chuckled into his armpit. 

“And what’s that?” she asked.

“About... eight percent?  Give or take,” Sherlock said shyly, “Much more than the average but I do have a busy life.  There’s many things going on.”

Molly laughed.