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1.
Lucy knew she was making a mistake as she directed the cab to the train station, while she boarded the outbound train, the entire second cab ride to a small house on a quiet street. She was going too far, she knew she was. There was no way John or Sherlock would let this slide the way they did almost everything else, the way they cut her slack because she was 'only just thirteen'. But then it was much too late to change her mind, so instead she rang the bell and stood up as straight as she could. When an old woman peered at her from around the front door Lucy cleared her throat and tried to smile. "Hello, Mrs. Watson. I'm your granddaughter."
She wasn't even sure why she was here - she hadn't wanted to go on that trip with her classmates that badly. She'd just been so angry, so utterly furious that everyone had agreed with her parents - even Grandmum, and she always took Lucy's side. Lucy was so mad sometimes, like there was nothing else in her, like there wasn't room for anything else. She just wanted to be angry for a while, just wanted to wallow in it, but no one would let her, no one cared at all what she thought.
Mrs. Watson didn't seem very happy to see her though, leading her towards the kitchen after Lucy had finally managed to convince her she was telling the truth. Lucy was silently directed to sit at the kitchen table while Mrs. Watson went to put the kettle on, and came back to the table with a plate of crackers. Lucy picked one up and tried to ignore the twisting in her stomach.
"I still don't understand why you're here," Mrs. Watson said, and no, she was definitely not happy.
Lucy unconsciously bit her lower lip before she could answer. "I just... I wanted to meet you. Maybe stay with you for a while?"
Mrs. Watson's eyebrows went very far up, and she reminded Lucy of John so much Lucy swallowed. "Why on earth would you want to stay here? I'm surprised you even know I exist; John hasn't been interested in keeping me in his life since he was old enough to get away." She sounded like she didn't like John very much, but Lucy wasn't sure why, because Mums loved their children, even awful Mums like Monica's. Maybe she just wasn't nice, Lucy thought. Andrew had called her once, years and years ago, before Monica or Kaden, and said she hadn't wanted to talk to him either, and he was her real grandson.
"John and Sherlock don't let me do things sometimes, things I should be able to do," Lucy said, though she knew it wasn't the right answer.
Mrs. Holmes snorted, then stood up as the kettle went off. "Well that's really none of my business, they've made that clear enough. Sherlock and John, you call them?" she said, disapproving.
Lucy looked down at her hands, trying not to answer her. Mrs. Watson was nothing like her Grandmum, who always wanted to hear what Lucy had to say and never questioned whether Lucy felt like calling them John and Sherlock or Dad and Papa or even just Very, Very Wrong. The feeling that they'd never forgive her was getting worse; she felt like she was going to cry. "I'm sorry I bothered you," she whispered, standing up awkwardly. There was always a chance she could leave now and run back home, that they'd never find out about this at all.
"Sit down," Mrs. Watson ordered, and Lucy immediately complied. Mrs. Watson brought over the tea, and placed it in front of Lucy. "I'm going to call John to come and get you; in the mean time you just stay there."
Lucy didn't hear all of the phone call, which was both better and worse. Mrs. Watson had told John he was teaching his kids to run away just like he did, and Lucy had heard her dad's voice all the way across the room, and then she'd started to cry, just a few tears until she'd sniffled them under control. Mrs. Watson came back into the room and if anything looked put-out by Lucy's expression. "It'll be fine," she said, like that was the problem. "He's on his way."
An hour and a half later Lucy was sitting with John's mum in the living room, silently watching reruns on the telly when the doorbell rang. Mrs. Watson went to answer the door and Lucy tensed, her entire top row of teeth embedded in her bottom lip. When the door opened to John and Sherlock her eyes widened and immediately teared up. She hadn't been expecting them both, Sherlock was in the middle of a case, he hated being interrupted and he hated more when Lucy did stupid things. Just thinking about what he was going to say made her want to run away.
They both strode into the room and headed straight for Lucy, who stood up instinctively. John looked angrier than she could remember seeing him, and Sherlock she could barely read on a good day, never mind when he was deliberately being inscrutable. Sherlock surprised her though, just silently ushered her towards the door to where a cab was waiting in the driveway. She heard John and his mum speaking in low voices, and John was following them out the door when Mrs. Watson said something that made him whip around and start yelling at her. He was still shouting when Sherlock sat her in the cab and shut the door. Lucy watched him go back up the steps and start talking, then he put a hand on John's elbow and John finally stepped back. Mrs. Watson was crying, Lucy realized, and though she hadn't liked the woman she still felt bad for making John angry at her. She hadn't meant to mess things up for everyone so badly.
Both her parents turned and went back towards the cab, and Lucy dropped her head, looked down on the ground. They got in next to her and Sherlock ordered the cabbie all the way back to Baker Street. John didn't say one word the whole time.
No one else was home when they finally got in; even Kaden was gone. It only made Lucy feel worse. Sherlock took off his coat and gave it to John, who stalked away to the coat closet. Lucy stood in the living room, unsure. Sherlock pointed to the sofa. "Sit."
Lucy sat down on her hands on the edge of the sofa. Sherlock sat in one of the chairs, his hands in front of his mouth, like Lucy was a case to solve. "You obviously regret doing this," he said, "but I can't understand why you would make such a stupid decision in the first place."
Lucy swallowed hard. "I just wanted to go on the trip."
Sherlock looked disbelieving, which was very, very bad. "You ran to John's mother, of all people, because you wanted to sulk over missing a two day trip to a place you've been to a dozen times already?" John walked back in, and started pacing behind Sherlock, his limp more pronounced because he was angry and distracted.
"No one else would listen," Lucy argued, though she knew in the back of her head she should have just kept her mouth shut.
"And you thought she would?" Sherlock asked.
John paused and stared at her. "Are you really trying to defend what you just did?" he asked before she could answer Sherlock. He was using his warning tone of voice, low and sharp, the one that even her Papa rarely argued with. Lucy shook her head, eyes wide. "We are your parents," he continued, "and if you ever go behind our backs to try and get a different answer again you're going to regret it, do you understand?"
"Yes," she answered, even though the minute she opened her mouth she started to cry.
John scrubbed at his eyes tiredly, and Sherlock dropped his hands down. "Go to your room; we'll talk about it tomorrow," he ordered, and she stood up to flee but found her feet stuck. "You have something to add?" he asked.
"Am I going to leave?" she asked, before she started crying too hard to speak.
"What?" Sherlock asked, like he was blindsided.
"Are you going to make me leave?" she mumbled in the direction of the coffee table and the floor.
"Lucy, you've been here since you were four," John answered, while she looked up at him, sniffing and wiping the back of her hand across her face. "You're not going anywhere ever, no matter what you do." He looked more upset at the idea of it than he had the entire rest of the night; Lucy wasn't sure why seeing him look like that made her feel better, but somehow it did.
"Oh," Lucy said.
"At this point you may not be leaving your room until you're thirty," Sherlock added very seriously. "Now go."
Lucy felt like she could finally move, and slouched off towards her room feeling confused and disappointed but no longer terrified enough to cry. "I'm sorry!" she called from half-way up the stairs.
"Go!" Sherlock ordered again.
Lucy went.
2.
John hates – hates – the end of the school year.
There’s always the usual business of replacing everything Andrew has destroyed (this year, aside from the blown out windows in the science lab, it would be a desk, three chairs, a set of beakers, and the school’s soft water system), and getting everyone's final projects finished, and counting up textbooks, and signing field trip release forms. There was trying to find suitable daytime care for when he and Sherlock were on a case, and if the year proved to continue as it had been there would be plenty of work. There was emptying desks and tearful goodbyes to beloved classroom pets and sending cupcakes and cookies and tarts for classroom parties.
John doesn’t mind all of that. Enjoys it, in fact, because the children’s excitement is infectious, and he can remember being little and building a diorama of a cell with his own father, for his final year project in grade three.
No, John hates the end of the school year because of the St. Bernadette’s Talent Show.
He and Sherlock had only had a hand in making one of them, but all four of their children might as well have been theirs by blood what with the way that, overnight, the four of them went from perfectly normal kids to completely insane.
The final week of school was nothing but a chaotic storm of screaming, fighting, and tears. Glitter would be bloody everywhere, children would be running around everywhere half-naked with partially finished costumes, and John, having already learned his lesson, made Andrew carry a box of tic-tacs in his pocket. As soon as he stopped hearing the rattle of mints, it was time to find out what his son was destroying.
As such, he’s learned to expect anything from anyone. Magic show, complete with rabbits and doves that smelled to high hell? Check. Revolutionary War re-enactment, with a vast array of tinfoil weaponry? Check. Death scene from Romeo and Juliet? Check. Last year, Andrew had set fire to the stage with a pyrotechnics display that had called for Sherlock having a long talk with their son and a donation of twenty thousand pounds to St. Bernadettes for a brand new stage. The year before that, Lucy called one of the judges, Beatrice Churchill, a ‘stupid bint’ and regardless of the fact that she was completely right, it had landed her a tearful suspension for the last four days of school.
Nothing his children could do would surprise him.
Or so he thought.
For the past week, he and Sherlock had been on a case that the Prime Minister – that is, Mycroft – had asked them to look into, involving the Greek ambassador, his daughter, and an English interpreter. ‘Open and shut domestic’, as Sherlock loved calling these little quirky cases, like real-life soap operas without the dramatic murder. Or at least, not usually.
He can hear the music before he even opens the door to Baker Street – Sherlock sighs, stares upwards at the heavens (and coincidentally the flashing lights coming from the flat windows). “It’s not too late,” he says, faintly. “We could take the ambassador up on his offer. A week in Greece, John.”
“A drink in each hand,” John says, grinning up at him. “You’d be bored in a day. An hour, even.”
There are backpacks and shoes all over the entryway, not that John is particularly surprised. There had been a wild assortment of girls at the flat for two weeks at least, eating them out of house and home and hitting decibels John hadn’t thought possible could come from a human being. Sherlock takes one look at the disaster and blurts, “I’ve got to finish this case, John."
John sends him a death glare. “If you abandon me to them I'll make you pay."
“Tell me so again tonight,” Sherlock murmurs, and kisses him long and deep and breathless so that John forgets why he’s mad in the first place and Sherlock, the louse, all but skips down to the basement office.
He sighs, rubbing his face, and looks between his fingers up to the flat. He can hear Lucy singing – impossible to miss – but even so, he isn’t expecting what he sees when he opens the door.
It’s Lucy. And Margery, and Bella, and Natalie and Monica, in gymnastics leotards and a ridiculous amount of tin foil wrapped like elaborate jewelry around their various limbs. They’ve shoved the furniture out of the way and are doing the choreography they’d been practicing for the last month. John just hadn’t realized they’d be doing it in skin tight spandex.
Neither, apparently, had Andrew.
“Oh my God,” he croaks, smacking a hand over Andrew’s eyes with one hand and the ‘stop’ button on the iPod dock with the other. Five female voices rise up in protest, and Andrew yells, “Hey!”, and Kaden says, “I’m the music stopper!”, and John points a finger at the stairs. “I don’t want to hear it. Girls, go get dressed, now.”
“Dadddddy!” Lucy shrieks. “It’s for the talent show!”
“I don’t care if it’s for the Pope,” he says, dragging Andrew across the room with him. “This is not appropriate for school, go get dressed.”
“But Mr. Holmes, all the other girls are doing it,” Margery interrupts, her red hair an enormous frizzy cloud around her face. “Lydia and Rachel and Constance are doing Lady Gaga too and they’re going to be all dressed up like this! Only better, because we only have silly old tumbling leotards, their mums made them awesome costumes.”
“What?” John demands, Andrew’s face still squashed against his armpit. Andrew finally breaks free and John frowns at him until his son, despite only having the sense God gave a goldfish, turns bright red and stomps up the stairs. Kaden follows him, chattering a mile a minute.
Only when John has heard the slam of the door does he turn back to the girls. “Okay, start from the beginning. Why are you wearing your old gymnastics things?”
“The other girls are doing Lady Gaga too, but it’s a different song and their mums made them costumes,” Lucy says, face wobbling as if she wants to cry and she’s trying very, very hard not to. It hits John in his heart right where she knew it would.
“I live with my dad, and Margery’s mum is crazy – sorry, Margery,” Bella chimes in, to which the little girl only shrugs, “--and Natalie lives with her grandmum who is about a hundred and ten. So we can’t get costumes, so we made them ourselves, and these were the only things we all had that matched.”
“Yes, but girls, surely you see that, Lady Gaga aside, this isn’t appropriate,” John says, searching their faces. They aren’t the little girls who'd come over for sleepovers with their Barbie blankets and teddy bears anymore, but budding young women -- emphasis on the budding. “You’ll kill the nuns if you go up on the stage like this. Do you want to see them collapse? There’ll be habits and wimples everywhere, a complete disaster.”
That, at least, makes them giggle, damp with emotions, always with the emotions. “Why didn’t you ask me for help?”
“No offense Daddy, but you and Papa aren’t exactly the type,” Lucy say, rubbing her nose with the back of her hand.
“Well, you’re probably right,” John says. “But I do know of a shop in Convent Garden that might do the trick.”
Lucy gasps. “Daddy.”
“If you need costumes, we’ll get costumes, I promise.” John smiles. “Saturday morning, Papa will take you all down to the dance shop, alright? And you can all pick out matching costumes for the show. How does that sound?”
The girls cheer and John grins, hero of the day, problem solved and thirteen-year-olds back in street clothes that don’t make him want to claw his eyes out. There’s still the matter of Andrew (in a way, he’s almost relieved – for a while there he and Sherlock weren’t sure which way their son was going to go, it’s nice to know John won’t be going to prison for murdering a man who looks at his baby the wrong way), but John figures that can wait at least until the weekend.
He doesn’t tell Sherlock about the Saturday plans, waiting to spring it on him, with relish, on Saturday morning as John is going out the door with Kaden to football practice.
He’ll always treasure the look Sherlock gives him as he’s shutting the door.
3.
Sherlock mentally calls up the statistics on brain aneurysms in men his age, because he’s convinced his oldest daughter is trying to set one off. “I’ve told you this one time too many, I’m not doing it again.”
“It’s. Not. Fair,” she tells him, arms crossed, staring down at him like his personal judge, jury and executioner.
“I didn’t ask you that,” he clarifies. “I didn’t ask you anything, point of fact. I told you what was happening, and now you deal with it, because the decision’s final.”
When she was younger and hadn't gotten her way she’d stomp her foot, sometimes kick things; now she just glares daggers at him and makes smart remarks. He’s found he prefers the property damage. “This is a stupid decision you’re basing off your own prejudices instead of the facts.”
“What facts am I ignoring?” he asks, half-incredulous, mostly annoyed. He has a case that he would much rather be using his time on, and she knows this, and is dragging out this argument to drive him insane.
“I told you it’d be supervised.”
“By his older brother, who is nineteen and a bigger moron than your classmate.” Sherlock’s frown is giving him a serious headache, and by his frown he means Lucille. “He has a record, you know.”
“Oh come on, they were skateboarding outside a designated park, it’s not like he was running a meth lab from his parents’ cellar.” She gives him a look like he’s an utter moron. She knows she’s not going, and he knows she’s not going, so the only option left for her is to make his life as miserable as he’s made hers. Sherlock understands this, but God in heaven is it unbearable. “It’s not fair," she blurts out angrily. “I never get to do anything.”
“Now you’re just being ridiculous, so I’m going to continue on with my actual job," he says, standing up. She huffs a breath at him, scowling. John says she looks just like Sherlock when she does that, but even he has never managed to express that much disdain without saying a word. It’s quite a gift.
He’s almost reached the door to the flat when he hears her mutter, “I can’t wait until the theatre group classes start.”
This is unexpected. “Excuse me?” he says, swirling around.
She looks back at him defiantly. “I joined the national youth theatre.”
“Oh, you did, did you.” He steps back into the room. “I don’t remember signing anything for that.”
“You don’t need to sign anything, it’s my choice.
Andrew walks in the room with an impatient look on his face, and starts off “Papa, I need--" before he actually sees their expressions and makes the smart decision to keep on walking into the kitchen to find John instead. Sherlock and Lucy don’t spare him a glance, too busy staring each other down like gunslingers at a duel.
“You’re not a legal adult; it’s my choice," he says.
“I auditioned and got accepted, so it was their choice, actually.” She puts her hands on her hips. “And I paid the nonrefundable deposit.”
Sherlock sucks in a breath and then yells for John.
4.
When John walks into Baker Street, a young man with flaming blue hair, a lip ring, and an expression like curdled milk is standing in his kitchen.
"Who the fuck are you?" the kid asks.
His eyebrow, he thinks, is stuck somewhere in his hairline. "Mr. Holmes. Who the fuck are you?"
He can hear Lucy upstairs, racing across from her bedroom to the loo as evidenced by the creaking floorboard directly overhead – any day now she was going to come crashing through them. The young man arches a brow at him, and John abruptly wants to smack the expression right off the child's face and he doesn't even know his name.
He sets the shopping bag down, hears Sherlock downstairs paying the cabbie. There are literally fifteen seconds before this entire situation blows up and John, in a moment of parenting brilliance, realizes exactly how he's going to play this.
Lucy comes galloping down the steps, sans pink hair thank Christ, no use in re-enacting that night three weeks ago, so John lets the whole shorts-on-top-of-trousers-on-top-of-tights look she's got going slide. She looks at him and good lord above John knows his child, because he can read exactly what she's thinking, from the crinkle of rebellion at the corners of her narrowed eyes to her smile, far too innocent.
John smiles at her. "Hello, love, I've just met your friend."
She's brought up short by his pleasantness, and with good reason -- the boy standing in his kitchen looks like bejeweled hell, like anime vomited him out, stirred him in with a bit of hipster shit, and sprinkled him with popsexuality. This is a lad that, without direction, would grow up to be the kind of git John had long ago vowed to rid the world of by any means necessary. He needs a haircut and a wash and a bloody smack, and that his mother has not provided any of those things speaks to the type of family he comes from.
But John knows his daughter. He knows her, so he smiles and shakes the boys hand like they're old friends and watches Lucy's eyes get wider and wider out of his periphery. Sherlock, being the brilliant man he is, follows his lead when he comes up the steps, and Lucy looks between them as if she’s they're possessed.
She can only take fifteen minutes of it before she's rushing him out the door, and John grins, utterly shameless. Sherlock chuckles low in his ear, pressing a kiss to his cheek.
"Just what was that?" Lucy demands when she rushes back up the steps, tugging her glove, an elbow-length tube sock that's been painted and blinged, back up her elbow.
"What was what?" John asks, handing Sherlock the tomato. "Such a nice young man," he tells him, getting the milk from the fridge.
Lucy makes a sound like an aborted scream and runs up the steps, door slamming closed with a bang.
They don't see the blue-haired idiot again.
5.
Sherlock hates Lucy's birthday.
No, this is inaccurate. Or, better -- misleading.
He hates her birthday celebrations.
Every year it is a big to-do. She insists. Every year, there are pizzas and cakes and decorations and children, so many children, hordes of them that pile into Baker Street and overrun it, shrieking and stomping and shredding every spec of concentration Sherlock has mustered for anything other than child-watching. He has absolutely no patience for any of it, but Lucy has failed to see his reasoning, the pointless ceremony of a cake on a day like any other, that signifies very little in the grand scheme of things.
John usually tells him to stop being a grinch. Sherlock despises that comparison, more than the birthday celebrations even, because it incites people to sing comparisons at him. So Sherlock puts up with the chaos, and the unholy mess, and the intrusion to any valuable work he may be doing at the time.
This year there are seven little girls stuffed into their sitting room, piling blankets and pillows and stuffed animals and far, far too many magazines featuring boys who would be jailed should their affections ever be returned. John shoved Sherlock into guard-watching duty while he went to clean the disaster area formerly known as their kitchen. Sherlock had gone into the sitting room to find it startlingly empty; every single girl had been crammed into the first floor loo, with full-size blankets and too many towels, because supposedly they all needed a shower and somehow their logic dictated the best way to accomplish this was to camp out together and hop in one at a time. Sherlock was not pleased.
Now they are all clean and dry and in the case of three of them medicated, and they can move on to shrieking part of the evening. Kaden is asleep upstairs with Andrew, who is probably hacking into one of Mycroft's satellites, but Sherlock can't be bothered with that. Either he'll get a phone call warning that his son is engaging in activities that could technically be defined as 'terrorist' or he'll find out some new information about military movements in the Middle East come breakfast.
"Lucille," he starts.
"No going in the basement, no going in the lab, no going in Andrew's room, or your room, no leaving the house, don't bother waking you up before eight, blah blah blah blah blah." The girls giggle, and one of them -- the one whose mother is dating a new man far younger than her, most likely for his money -- asks, "Why does he always call you Lucille?"
"Daddy says 'cause he's much too posh," Lucy says. The girls laugh, and start talking over one another, and then there is more shrieking and Sherlock is left scowling at the back of his daughter's head.
The television blares as someone pushes a button, and there is yet more laughter, and at that point Sherlock gives up entirely.
When John joins him in the bedroom Sherlock is flat on the bed in nothing but pajama bottoms, his hands poised over his lips. John glances at him and turns towards the wardrobe, choosing to undress first. Sherlock watches him absently, admiring the lines, the sinewy muscles that shift as he moves. Damn children.
"Good job, Papa," John says, stretching out next to him. Sherlock makes a noise of discontent.
"I'm going to find a way to stop this from happening ever again," he says, the words muffled slightly by his thumbs.
"You say that every year, and it hasn't happened yet." John sighs and closes his eyes. Sherlock glances at him; he's found it's easier to stare at John for no other reason than because he wants to if John isn't aware of it. When John notices he tends to make Sherlock's life very difficult by calling him a romantic or charming or any number of other things that are blatantly untrue.
"I am not posh," Sherlock says suddenly.
"Of course you are," John answers, his eyes still closed. Sherlock frowns.
"Papa, Daddy?"
They both turn to look at the door, where Lucy is standing. "Yes?" John asks.
"Can we buy a movie?" Lucy asks.
"Go ahead," John says, eyes slipping closed again, too tired to care further. Lucy has enough common sense (or experience being without privileges for unapproved viewing choices, if he’s going to be more accurate) to choose something age-appropriate.
Sherlock has turned towards the ceiling again; they barely have time to register the pounding of feet before she's pounced on them both, crushing several of Sherlock's necessary organs and inadvertently punching John dead in his back. "Lucille."
"Thank you for the party," Lucy says, kissing John soundly on the cheek, turning to do the same for Sherlock, putting her arms around his neck in a proprietary manner. "Especially since you're so grinchy about parties, Papa."
Sherlock tries to frown at her but she kisses him again, half on the nose, then hauls off him and runs back out, slamming the door behind her. He can feel John shaking next to him and affects an air of quiet superiority.
He still hates birthday parties.