YULE

[fighting_northumerland]

John stopped in front of the front door. It wasn't too late, he reasoned-- they hadn't seen him yet. They could escape back into the cab, get Chinese, have a quiet night to themselves and not deal with the madness of Watson Christmas...

Behind them, the cab pulled away and turned off into traffic. Trapped.

"Well then," he said, steeling himself, and knocked.

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"Then how did he know? Was he magic?"

Sherlock snorted quietly. Harry looked very much as if she wanted to make some sort of fairy-related comment, but a warning glance from their parents ensured she kept listening rather than interrupting.

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"In a manner of speaking," John said, cryptically. "It certainly seemed like magic. I said 'Hold on here, I haven't said a thing about flatmates, we don't know the first thing about one another!' and as it turns out, I was wrong. The man knew everything about my military career, my current situation, even my family. All I knew in return was that I was to meet one Sherlock Holmes at 221B Baker Street. I had no idea that shortly after that we'd be off investigating a string of murders."

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"Sherlock--" Susan's eyes were approaching saucer-like size as she turned her attention to her uncle's weird boyfriend. "You mean he's the magic stranger?"

Although he didn't look at her, Sherlock calmly took off his watch, set it in the palm of one hand, covered it with his other palm--and then pulled his hands apart to reveal that both were empty. Which drew appreciative laughter from the adult members of John's audience and gasps from the children.

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Even John laughed at that. "Clearly," he chuckled, "now, when I arrived at Baker Street, and found it a total unlivable mess-" he gave Sherlock a pointed look before going on, "I settled in for what I thought was quiet evening. As it turns out, there was a man at the door for Sherlock- the Detective Inspector from Scotland Yard, asking for Sherlock's help on a bizarre case of serial suicides. Turns out that the forensics expert on the scene was one Sherlock had-- ah-- strained relations with, so my quiet night in turned into a jaunt to a crime scene on the other side of London."

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"You loved it," Sherlock muttered. It didn't manage to escape Harry's notice, and she grinned hugely at John. Clearly she had begun to make deductions of her own about the nature of this relationship.

"Was there blood everywhere?" one of the little boys asked excitedly. His mother promptly scolded him for it.

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"Not blood, no," John said, pointedly ignoring Sherlock's interjections. "You remember, from a few years ago, the serial suicides? Four people, each found in a random place, dead seemingly by their own hand- poison. But how? How did they all have the same poison? No connection between the victims, the places- none of them were even suicidal. Only Sherlock knew the pink lady had been murdered."

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"By magic?" Susan asked, breathless.

"There's no such thing as magic," Sherlock said, and then proceeded to produce a wallet out of thin air. He offered it to John almost casually. "There, that's yours."

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"Sherlock!" John said, started out of his reverie. He grabbed his wallet and jammed it back in his pocket. A great aunt nodded in an understanding matter. "You should only use your powers for good, not theft."

"Anyways, the murderer may have gone on and never been caught, if he hadn't made a mistake-- one that Sherlock caught. Sherlock realized the woman was from out of town, and that there were tiny stains on the back of her leg from a rolling suitcase-- a rolling suitcase that was no where at the scene!"

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"Actually, excuse me," Sherlock interrupted, "there's a bigger issue here. Which is that you should take off my watch."

Somehow, while John had been talking, he'd managed to get the watch onto his friend's wrist. It was, admittedly, very much a cheap parlor trick, but he'd been very strict about repressing his show-off tendencies the whole evening. And really, it was this or let John know via Morse code exactly which of his cousins was high, who was having an affair, and how many of them were either in the closet or in debt.

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No one was able to contain themselves. The stunned look on John's face as he gazed dumbfounded at his own wrist was too much, and Harry looked like she was about to cry. John aimed a playful swat at Sherlock before unfastening and returning the watch, humbly accepting his defeat.

After the laughter died down, he described finding the suitcase, the slight misunderstanding with Scotland Yard (carefully editing out the drugs bust portion of the affair) and now Sherlock was alone with the mad cabbie.

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It took Sherlock a moment to realize he was supposed to pick up the story from there. He leaned against the back of the couch, much in the same way he tended to do when John was writing a blog entry and he wanted to read over his friend's shoulder.

"Well. I got in the cab, since he'd promised to tell me how he did it. And then he proceeded to drive us all over London--honestly, I've seen blind people take a more direct route..."

"Where did you go?" Susan asked insistently, practically falling into John's lap in her excitement.

"An empty building. A school, in fact." He paused for a moment, his thoughts clearly folding back in on themselves. "One of the quietest places in the city. And then he offered me a choice: two pills. One poisoned, the other not. All I had to do was figure out which was which."

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"Which he did," John said, unable to keep the annoyance out of his voice, "instead of running or calling for backup or anything sane."

His hand creeped back over to find Sherlock's. The incident was long since history, but he still remembered the way he froze when he saw Sherlock, poised to take the pill...

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"And?" Susan asked, almost a whisper.

There was a moment of silence, tense and breathless--and then Sherlock slid his hand into John's and squeezed gently.

"And I beat him," he finished, with a sly grin. "I took the right one. The murderer was killed by his own weapon."

Some of the adult Watsons were clearly a little uncomfortable with a story that ended in a dead murderer (at least while the kids were still up), but everyone under the age of ten was instantly won over by this incredible ending. How many stories did they get to hear, after all, where the bad guy died because somebody else was clever?

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Everyone else was too riveted to notice John's half-second look before he resumed his stoic expression. Sherlock would cover for his extra legal intervention by creating a story of his own cleverness.

"Taste of his own medicine," John managed, smiling thinly.

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One or two of the kids applauded: clearly they approved of the villain getting such a dramatic comeuppance, especially at the hands of an unlikely hero. (A few of them did seem disappointed that there hadn't been a lightsaber battle or a gunfight.) Susan herself was thrilled.

"And is that how you became boyfriends?" she asked excitedly.

Sherlock sort of froze.

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"Susan!" her mother admonished, but John waved his hand to quiet her.

"I'm afraid things don't move that quickly," he said, "We'd only just met, after all. Less that twenty-four hours of being flatmates."

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Sherlock didn't let go of him, but his hand was tense--as good an indication as any that John's tiny cousin had given him a momentary panic attack.

"Lot of procrastination, though, wasn't it?" Harry grinned. "Took you, what, two years to get yourselves sorted?"

Okay, so maybe the panic attack was ongoing.

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John sighed, leaning his head back into Sherlock's chest. He'd heard application of pressure was used to quiet down startled cattle, maybe it worked on consulting detectives.

"Oh, shut up," he replied, casually but with a hint of iron. "There were...circumstances."

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Although his partner's heartbeat was thumping wildly against John's hair, he did manage to take a deep breath and force a few of the muscles in his shoulders to relax.

"There's always circumstances." Harry wrinkled her nose, rather childishly. "Only shoes belong in the closet, Johnny."

"Whose closet?" asked Susan. Her mother looked about ready to die of embarrassment.

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"The closet to Narnia," John said, in what he assumed was the correct way to explain Important Things to children, "where people go when Earth is just a bit too much. I wasn't closeted, I'm just..." he shrugged.

Not gay for anyone else.

"There were cases, girlfriends, national crises...not to mention he was indisposed for a while," John said, maybe a little too sharply.

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"And I have trouble with people."

It was a startlingly open admission on Sherlock's part--possibly the most personal thing he'd said all night. Harry's eyes widened in surprise; somewhere behind them, Mrs Watson slipped an arm around her husband's shoulder.

"I can read facts. Things, for the most part. People are..." He trailed off before giving John's hand another squeeze and pulling back slightly, as if he were trying to prove a point to himself. "Complicated. Anyway."

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You didn't have to be Sherlock to see the way John's chest puffed up and he looked a little taller on the couch. That's right his body language screamed, Sherlock Holmes admits his weaknesses for no one but me. Someone say something about him, I dare you.

"Slow but steady wins the race," he said, mildly. "Come sit with me on the couch, you loom like a stork."

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Sherlock started to say something, probably a reflexive protest of some sort: after all, he was still getting used to the idea of having a real friend, much less a partner, so his default response was withdrawal. But Susan--Susan, of all people, who could not have been more than eight--slid off the couch and patted the space where she'd been sitting. Right next to John.

Oh. Well.

He murmured a quick thank-you in Susan's direction before settling in next to his partner. There was really no logical reason why he should feel so relaxed in someone else's personal space, but then there was really no logical reason for anything else that had happened in the past year, either.

Harry watched them both with interest and perhaps a touch of concern. She was good at people; despite all the jokes she'd been cracking she was starting to form a real picture of this relationship as a very serious one. Which she hadn't really expected from her brother.

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John still had shame and a proper sense of propriety- so instead of shameless curling around Sherlock like a weighted blanket, he wrapped his arm around his shoulders instead.

Susan was getting many, many extra gifts for Boxing Day.

For a while they sat like that, sharing a moment of silence while gifts were examined and the soft sound of clearing up could be heard.

[punchmeitssubtext]

"Thank you," he said, after a long moment. He'd tried to use that time to puzzle out whether or not this blatant display of affection would attract staring and commentary the way it did in his own family. As it turned out, there was so much casual contact between people in the room--partners, spouses, brothers and sisters, parents and children--that sitting on the couch with one's boyfriend was... really not a very big deal.