Mycroft clinks his glass against Sherlock’s. “Unless you’re planning to move in with me permanently, you will eventually have to make up your mind. I’d be happy to put you up tonight, but you can’t avoid it forever.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Avoid what?”
“Sentiment.”
Sherlock gives his brother a sharp look, but detects no derision. He takes a swallow of whisky. “I don’t need a lecture, brother mine.”
Mycroft shrugs. “Then go to him. Wish him a happy birthday.”
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When Sherlock and John learned to bake
For two of their biggest fans' sake,
They made for dear Nova
A fresh fruit pavalova;
Notjustmom got a huge birthday cake!
John discovers that Sherlock has deleted a fact considerably more important than the structure of the solar system, and the art of detection faces a challenge.
“So. We should, you know. Make it an occasion. If we can only find out when it is?”
“John, that’s quite simple. Inquire.”
“That – Sherlock, that’s not how it’s done. It’s always meant to be a surprise. So – so the person doesn’t feel put on the spot, or as if they’re asking to be made a fuss of, or – you just don’t do it that way.”
“How are we to find out, then?”
“You’re the deductive expert. You tell me.”
Read On AO3
Posted in the Birthday Collection for @notjustamumj and NovaNara! Many Happy Returns!
Sherlock is thorough in his education of Rosie. When she starts asking about clocks, watches, and time itself, he dives in like an eager schoolboy.
John thinks it’ll be sufficient to teach their daughter about digital numerals. Of course, Sherlock cannot agree to such outrageous and inadequate tutelage.
“She might come across analogue clocks or watches, John, and what then? They will seem like hieroglyphs to her; she won’t understand them. At all!”
“Calm down, my precious husband. She’s barely eight, you know.”
“The sooner she learns this, the sooner we can move on to other topics. It is never too early to start.”
“What other topics?” John asks suspiciously.
Sherlock just waves a hand in lieu of answering, as if to say: “Oh, you know. Useful skills.”
This does not placate John, but he knows which fights to pick and which to leave behind. For now, at least.
***
Sherlock does his research and brings Rosie to the Clockmaker’s Museum in South Kensington, which is a part of the Science Museum. There are clocks, watches, and chronometers; more than 1400 objects in fact. John is sceptical when Sherlock divulges where he’ll take their daughter on a Saturday morning, but in the end, he decides to trust his husband.
Rosie is in awe of all the different items, and when Sherlock presents the treasure hunt form, she beams up at him.
Of course, they start with the frightening and gruesome section.
Can you find a watch which looks like a skull – ugghhhhrr!
Sherlock shudders at the unseemly collection of letters at the end, but Rosie just laughs and tries to find the correct glass case, which to Sherlock’s delight are all numbered with Roman numerals.
Rosie is obviously not overly impressed by the metallic skull. There is after all a real human skull residing on their mantle back home.
The next object on the scary list, as Rosie calls it, is more to Sherlock’s liking.
A lock of hair from the beheaded King Charles in 1649 is believed to be in this case – please do not faint!
“As if,” he scoffs, while Rosie makes her way to the case with the number VI on it.
They move to the Explosive Stuff after that, much to Sherlock’s delight.
This clever clock rewinds itself by making its own really explosive gas – do not worry it is not workingtoday!
“Pity,“ Sherlock mutters.
***
Once Rosie has found every object on the list, Sherlock decides to start the education for real. They walk around to look at the clocks now, which have larger faces and hands. He avoids the ones with Roman numerals since Rosie’s had enough of those after the hunt earlier.
The girl is just as curious as Sherlock was himself at her age, and she marvels at the ticking sounds the second hands make. She even startles a bit when the minute hand moves once the second hand has completed its revolution.
“Is time broken, papa?” she asks when they encounter a large grandfather clock that has stopped.
“Not as such. But most of these older clocks need to be wound up to work.”
“Do they get tired?”
Sherlock hides his smile and places a hand on his daughter’s nape.
“You could say that. They work relentlessly all day, always ticking and showing the correct time. That does sound exhausting.”
Rosie yawns and nods solemnly.
***
“Look, papa! They have that strange thing Uncle Myc has in his living room.”
“Ah, yes. That is a clock of sorts too, you know. It is called an hourglass.”
“Oh! Why is it called that? Does it only show one hour?”
“My clever girl! Though, the time depends on how much sand there is in them. They have been around for around one thousand years.”
“Wow! That’s old.”
“Hence why your uncle has one,” Sherlock smirks.
“Can we make one ourselves?” Rosie wants to know.
“Of course. There’s an instruction manual we can take home right there.”
“Brilliant! And when all the sand has run through, it will be as if time has stopped.”
“Well, yes. The hourglass is used to measure time, not to show it like clocks and watches do.”
“Like an old-fashioned stopwatch?”
“Exactly.”
***
Over dinner that evening, Rosie tells John all about their excursion.
“It was too bad you had to work, daddy. I had such fun!”
“I’m glad to hear it, sweetheart. Knowing how to read the time is a useful skill,” John replies and winks at Sherlock, who smiles knowingly at him.
“And in the end, I found another weird clock thing which is ill suited to show the time. At least in this rainy weather. Another time breaker.”
John lifts his eyebrows at his daughter, who rolls her eyes in a sherlockian fashion.
“A sundial. Obviously.”
“Obviously,” her parents mirthfully reply in unison.
A little silver bird whispered a few gentle words in my ear (something about a "twin" birthday) and this is the result. I've fixed Sherlock's return. Again.
Happy birthday @notjustamumj @imnova 🥳 🥳
Are You Breathing Better, My Love?
Summary: Sherlock is in no state to seek John out after his return from Serbia. His body is broken and he spends weeks in hospital. To his disappointment, John is not the first person to visit him when visitors are allowed, and when he finally appears, he's got his fiancée with him. A woman who has liar written all over her face. It's all rather hateful.
Mycroft clinks his glass against Sherlock’s. “Unless you’re planning to move in with me permanently, you will eventually have to make up your mind. I’d be happy to put you up tonight, but you can’t avoid it forever.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Avoid what?”
“Sentiment.”
Sherlock gives his brother a sharp look, but detects no derision. He takes a swallow of whisky. “I don’t need a lecture, brother mine.”
Mycroft shrugs. “Then go to him. Wish him a happy birthday.”
Honestly surprised that Lucy Hebron doesn't get more attention in media focusing on the Sherlock Holmes extended universe.
Like, you're born in Atlanta Georgia sometime in the 1880s. Your mother is a white English immigrant. Your father is an African American lawyer who has managed to become fairly wealthy off his practice.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle claims that your parents were married, but they almost certainly weren't or, if they were, they probably had to go elsewhere to get married and their marriage wouldn't have been recognised in Georgia. Realistically, they were facing huge amounts of prejudice that are only increased when you are born.
(Your mother openly says, in front of you when you're older, that it is a “great misfortune” that you were born with darker skin than even your father.)
Then disaster strikes. Your father dies. Your mother can't stand to stay in America without him and returns to England.
She does not take you with her. She says this is because of your health. It's just way healthier for you to stay where you are, as a parentless mixed race child in the Jim Crow era American South. Rather than going with your only living relative to England (which, while obviously still very racist, at least doesn't have any actual laws against people like you existing).
Your mother meets a new man. A merchant. He's white. She signs over all your father's money and investments to him when they marry. She doesn't tell him about you. She's worried he wouldn't understand. She later explains that this was a major ordeal for her. That she struggled in vain to resist the urge to send for you for three years, until it got too much to bear.
So now you live in England. In a cottage on the estate that was partly paid for by your father's money.
You're not allowed to leave the cottage, because if anyone sees you outside in the daylight then they might find out that you're black. While you're in the cottage, even (apparently) at nighttime, you are made to wear long gloves and a fucking mask, so that nobody can accidentally look through the window and find out that you're black.
Your mother visits you occasionally. She tells you that you're her “own girlie and mother's pet” whether you're “dark or fair”. When her husband comes to see what's going on, you and your nurse get shoved out the back door so he won't see you and find out that you're black.
Unfortunately, your stepfather has noticed that his wife keeps randomly going off in the middle of the night to visit a mysterious cottage where the only inhabitant seem to be a weirdly secretive servant woman and a strange masked figure, and has decided that something Fucked Up is going on.
So he goes to consult the Great Detective Sherlock Holmes. Normally, the Great Detective Sherlock Holmes can work this kind of shit out in his sleep, but unfortunately your family is so dysfunctional that you override his borderline magical deduction abilities, and the best theory he can come up with is either “secret affair” or “weirdly convoluted blackmail scheme”.
Fortunately however, this does lead to your stepfather eventually meeting you and finding out who you are. Including the fact that you're black.
Turns out he's fine with it.
Like completely. Quite possibly more so than your own mother is. Turns out there was no need for the traumatic abandonment, the years of separation and then the even more traumatic being forced to live like The Man In The Iron Mask in a cottage in the middle of nowhere.
Nope. Turns out you could have been allowed to go outside in daylight this entire time. You all go back to the big house (that was paid for in part with your father's investments) together and we never find out what happens to you.
I mean… what. The. Fuck.
Like, I'm not expecting Sir Arthur CD to have written an entire child psychology textbook to go with what was meant to be a fun little short story about racial tolerance, but holy shit.
I want a book about teenage Lucy Hebron at boarding school dealing with all the fucked up shit that went on in her childhood whilst also solving mysteries with the help of correspondence from her friend and mentor Sherlock Holmes. I want that shit yesterday.
Benedict cumberbatch, Martin Freeman and Sophie Hunter in the Royal Box ahead of the semi final match between Arthur Fery and Alexander Zverev, Day 12.
Hello again! It's Good Omens Throwback Thursday, something I started posting intermittently a few years back, after realizing how incredibly many good fics were already the stuff of history (and to shamelessly promote some of my own older works). Lately a posse of wonderful writers have picked up the idea, with the twist of reflecting on their own writing process: check out @curiouspupsicle, @quitequaintrelle, @rogue-bard, @ineffabildaddy, @carry-the-sky (and more!). Meanwhile, I've been occupied with the question: how do you respond to critique of elements in your fic that feels thoughtful and, on consideration, legitimate?
I've actually already featured Ethical Considerations, my first AU, posted in 2020. Over the years, it's continued to receive a steady trickle of kudos and comments, and some of those comments addressed issues with two specific beats in the story that I would handle differently now.
-- Was it either realistic or satisfying for this human version of Crowley, all too prone to self-medicate instead of coping with his emotions, to escape any legal consequences whatever for drink driving? I had to admit, a flippant message and not an incentive for the kind of growth the character practically cried out for.
-- Did this Salvation-Army-raised, semi-closeted Aziraphale ever get proper acknowledgement of a traumatic boundary violation -- one to which other characters, Crowley included, reacted by exhorting him to move on when he was clearly dissociating and sexually shutting down? Um, no. Instead, in the wake of Crowley's acting out, he rebooted their sexual connection after a little cursory make-up dialogue, without anyone ever giving much space to his trauma reaction. Romantic, but hardly wholesome. I squirmed a little bit as I thunk it over.
The thing is that AO3 is the kind of platform where you can fix that. No one suggested that the story be rewritten -- only that a couple of the existing elements of the narrative could have been addressed more thoughtfully. I had wanted to get my pair to a happy ending with all dispatch, but in the rearview, their reconciliation scene read like the unearned flip of a switch. And after Season 3 (or whatever that was), a narrative that shortchanged Aziraphale's courage and trauma, while letting Crowley completely off the hook for wallowing drunkenly in his feels, just landed wrong.
So, first in 2024 and again since s3 aired, I reworked sections of the dialogue in the final chapter, when the major incident of the story is done and dusted and Aziraphale and Crowley are actually obliged to communicate. [I downloaded the earlier versions as PDFs, so no iteration of the story is lost, and referenced the changes I made in an addition to the chapter notes.] It felt especially important to indicate clearly that Crowley's bestie -- a literal crisis counselor -- respected what Aziraphale had been through, and had words with Crowley about how he handled it. The point of the fic's breakup scene (essentially the s1 bandstand scene), as with every moment of conflict in the first two TV seasons, is that on some level they are both right and both have legitimate feelings, and I did my best to rework the chapter in a way that honors that.
There's a fair amount of discourse about unsolicited criticism on fic, and most of the time I am firmly in the corner of "if you didn't like it, step quietly back from the keyboard with your hands in plain sight." We write for free, we write for love, we are all at different places in our creative growth, and we are not here to be nitpicked or scolded because someone doesn't like that kind of story or we used the word "ecstatic" three times in a scene or the AI police are out in force. And we are telling our story, not the one that someone else thinks we should write. But if two or three readers experience a particular element of a story as dissonant in a specific way -- insensitive to an issue that touches them, or emotionally unrealistic -- and address that reaction respectfully? I think it's appropriate to consider their points. And if a few tweaks yield what feels like a better story, it's a win all round.
You can read the story here if you're new to it, or check in on Chapter 15 if you just want to see the changes and notes.
Ethical Considerations - rated E, ~37,000 words
Aziraphale Fell isn’t exactly in the closet, but he’s not made it much further out than the hat-stand. The hairdresser at the spa where he’s just taken a job is far too flamboyant for his liking – doubtless, that’s why he can’t get the man out of his mind. His boss is a grouchy, nonbinary terror, who has an inexplicable soft spot for a priggish conservative MP from Oxfordshire. His best friend can’t stop predicting he’s fated to couple up soon. And the rent is due.
Tagging in the replies as usual; drop a note if you want on or off the list.
I write mainly Good Omens, along with occasional ventures into Sherlock Holmes (BBC and ACD), Doctor Who, and my first love, Star Trek. Find my fic here on AO3.
John delivers the statement in as serious a tone as he can muster.
There’s no reply from behind the newspaper. Sherlock is pyjama-clad, sprawled in his chair, bare feet out toward the fire puttering in front of them.
John clears his throat. “Do you know what day it is?”
“Sunday.” The answer’s quickly delivered, but Sherlock continues to hide behind his paper.
Not exactly what John wants to hear. The world’s most observant detective can sometimes be blind to the obvious, but this time it’s not likely. Wearily, he asks, “Today’s date?”
A sigh. The newspaper is lowered to the point where those blue eyes can glare at him. “The fifteenth of January. But what you really mean is that Watson’s birthday is less than a month away.”
“Good deduction. We can’t wait any longer if we’re to avoid a repeat of last year’s debacle.”
Open a bank account or get a credit card without signed permission from her father or hr husband.
Serve on a jury - because it might inconvenience the family not to have the woman at home being her husband’s helpmate.
Obtain any form of birth control without her husband’s permission. You had to be married, and your hub and had to agree to postpone having children.
Get an Ivy League education. Ivy League schools were men’s colleges ntil the 70′s and 80′s. When they opened their doors to women it was agree that women went there for their MRS. Degee.
Experience equality in the workplace: Kennedy’s Commission on the Status of Women produced a report in 1963 that revealed, among other things, that women earned 59 cents for every dollar that men earned and were kept out of the more lucrative professional positions.
Keep her job if she was pregnant.Until the Pregnancy Discrimination Act in 1978, women were regularly fired from their workplace for being pregnant.
Refuse to have sex with her husband.The mid 70s saw most states recognize marital rape and in 1993 it became criminalized in all 50 states. Nevertheless, marital rape is still often treated differently to other forms of rape in some states even today.
Get a divorce with some degree of ease.Before the No Fault Divorce law in 1969, spouses had to show the faults of the other party, such as adultery, and could easily be overturned by recrimination.
Have a legal abortion in most states.The Roe v. Wade case in 1973 protected a woman’s right to abortion until viability.
Take legal action against workplace sexual harassment. According to The Week, the first time a court recognized office sexual harassment as grounds for legal action was in 1977.
Play college sports Title IX of the Education Amendments of protects people from discrimination based on sex in education programs or activities that receive Federal financial assistance It was nt until this statute that colleges had teams for women’s sports
Apply for men’s Jobs The EEOC rules that sex-segregated help wanted ads in newspapers are illegal. This ruling is upheld in 1973 by the Supreme Court, opening the way for women to apply for higher-paying jobs hitherto open only to men.
This is why we needed feminism - this is why we know that feminism works
I just want to reiterate this stuff, because I legit get the feeling there are a lot of younger women for whom it hasn’t really sunk in what it is today’s GOP is actively trying to return to.
Did you go to a good college? Shame on you, you took a college placement that could have gone to a man who deserves and needs it to support or prepare for his wife & children. But if you really must attend college, well, some men like that, you can still get married if you focus on finding the right man.
Got a job? Why? A man could be doing that job. You should be at home caring for a family. You shouldn’t be taking that job away from a man who needs it (see college, above). You definitely don’t have a career – you’ll be pregnant and raising children soon, so no need to worry about promoting you.
This shit was within living memory. I’M A MILLENIAL and my mother was in the second class that allowed women at an Ivy League school. Men who are alive today either personally remember shit like this or have parents/family who have raised them into thinking this was the way America functioned back in the blissful Good Old Days. There are literally dudes in the GOP old enough to remember when it was like this and yearn for those days to return.
When people talk about resisting conservativism and the GOP, we’re not just talking about whether the wage gap is a myth or not. We’re talking about whether women even have the fundamental right to exist as individuals, to run their own households and compete for jobs and be considered on an equal footing with men in any arena at all in the first place.
I was a child in the 1960s, a teenager in the 1970s, a young adult in the 1980s.
This is what it was like:
When I was growing up, it was considered unfortunate if a girl was good at sports. Girls were not allowed in Little League. Girls’ teams didn’t exist in high school, except at all-girls’ high schools. Boys played sports, and girls were the cheerleaders.
People used to ask me as a child what I wanted to be when I grew up. I said I wanted to be a brain surgeon or the first woman justice on the Supreme Court. Everyone told me it was impossible–those just weren’t realistic goals for a girl–the latter, especially, because you couldn’t trust women to judge fairly and rationally, after all.
In the 1960s and 1970s, all women were identified by their marital status, even in arrest reports and obituaries. In elementary school, my science teacher referred to Pierre Curie as DOCTOR Curie and Marie Curie as MRS. Curie…because, as he put it, “she was just his wife.” (Both had doctorates and both were Nobel prize winners, so you would think that both would be accorded respect.)
Companies could and did require women to wear dresses and skirts. Failure to do could and did get women fired. And it was legal. It was also legal to fire women for getting married or getting pregnant. The rationale was that a woman who was married or who had a child had no business working; that was what her husband was for. Aetna Insurance, the biggest insurance company in America, fired women for all of the above.
A man could rape his wife. Legally. I can remember being twelve years old and reading about legal experts actually debating whether or not a man could actually be said to coerce his wife into having sex. This was a serious debate in 1974.
The debate about marital rape came up in my law school, too, in 1984. Could a woman be raped by her husband? The guys all said no–a woman got married, so she was consenting to sex at all times. So I turned it around. I asked them if, since a man had gotten married, that meant that his wife could shove a dildo or a stick or something up his ass any time she wanted to for HER sexual pleasure.
(Hey, I thought it was reasonable. If one gender was legally entitled to force sex on the other, then obviously the reverse should also be true.)
The male law students didn’t like the idea. Interestingly, they commented that being treated like that would make them feel like a woman.
My reaction was, “Thank you for proving my point…”
The concept of date rape, when first proposed, was considered laughable. If a woman went out on a date, the argument of legal experts ran, sexual consent was implied. Even more sickening was the fact that in some states–even in the early 1980s–a man could rape his daughter…and it was no worse than a misdemeanor.
Women taking self-defense classes in the 1970s and 1980s were frequently described in books and on TV as “cute.” The implication was that it was absurd for a woman to attempt to defend herself, but wasn’t it just adorable for her to try?
I was expressly forbidden to take computer classes in junior and senior years of high school–1978-79 and 1979-80–because, as the principal told me, “Only boys have to know that kind of thing. You girls are going to get married, and you won’t use it.”
When I was in college–from 1980 to 1984–there were no womens’ studies. The idea hadn’t occurred in many places because the presumption was that there was nothing TO study. My history professor–a man who had a doctorate in history–informed me quite seriously that women had never produced a noted painter, sculptor, composer, architect or scientist because…wait for it…womens’ brains were too small.
(He was very surprised when I came up with a list of fifty women gifted in the arts and science, most of whom he had never heard of before.)
When Walter Mondale picked Geraldine Ferraro as a running mate in 1984, the press hailed it as a disaster. What would happen, they asked fearfully, if Mondale died and Ferraro became president? What if an international crisis arose and she was menstruating? She could push the nuclear button in a fit of PMS! It would be the end of the WORLD!!
…No, they WEREN’T kidding.
On the surface, things are very different now than they were when I was a child, a teen and a young adult. But I’m afraid that people now do not realize what it was like then. I’ve read a lot of posts from young women who say that they are not feminists. If the only exposure to feminism they have is the work of extremists, I cannot blame them overmuch.
I wish that I could tell them what feminism was like when it was new–when the dream of legal equality was just a dream, and hadn’t even begun to come true. When “woman’s work” was a sneer–and an overt putdown. When people tut-tutted over bright and athletic girls with the words, “Really, it’s a shame she’s not a boy.” That lack of feminism wasn’t all men opening doors and picking up checks. A lot of it was an attitude of patronizing contempt that hasn’t entirely died out, but which has become less publicly acceptable.
I wish I could make them feel what it was like…when grown men were called “men” and grown women were “girls.”
I am 70. I remember all those things. I was a student nurse from 64 to 67 and we were not permitted to “finish” a bed bath on a male or insert a catheter in a male. Seeing male genitals might cause us “harm” or upset our delicate sensibilities. Imagine when we graduated and were “thrown” to the wolves. Imagine if you were a male patient who had to be the first to be “practiced” on by a graduate nurse. (Ha!) At the school I attended no student nurse could be married. Only one school in my city (Atlanta) would even admit married women and Male Nurses weren’t even thought of. What man would want to be a nurse when he could be a Doctor. In all my training I only remember 3 or 4 Women who were Doctor’s and a very few, (less than 5 or 6) female interns or residents (and this was a teaching hospital) and most of those were OB/Gyns and one was a pediatrician.
When I graduated and was going to get married I wanted to go on birth control pills. You needed to be on them for a least one cycle before they were effective. I won’t go into what hoops I had to jump through to get a prescription from my Dr. (a man, natch) but when i went to the drug store to get the prescription filled I ended up having to get my future husband to “accompany” me so the pharmacist “interview” him and see if it was okay with him for me to be on the pill.
Even when we went to get a marriage license I had to get my Father’s signature and we had to go before a Judge because I was not yet 21 (I was 20 and 9 months).
I could go on and on, getting a credit card in MY name, etc., but I will tell you that WE MUST RESIST.
The number of people I know who romanticize gender inequality is frankly terrifying. A world never existed in which the lives of women were simplified by benevolent men who saw to her every want and need. That was not a thing. A world never existed in which women were all ladies, men were all gentlemen, & everything was some great big cishet fairytale. Feminists aren’t a bunch of upstarts who want to destroy a perfectly wholesome and non-harmful system. Just…look at history. Look at the posts above. We. Must. Resist..
This is what they mean, when they say “Old-fashioned values”
When conservatives start waxing lyrical about the ‘good old days’, this is what they mean. They are fully aware how much things blew for women, and they would like to return to that.
At first I re-blogged this with no commentary added because it’s already so thorough and good.
But then I realized I actually do want to add something. This was written nine years ago. In the 9 years that have come to pass the white nationalist Christian fascism ultra right agenda of misogyny has had many victories.
In the United States just off the top of my head a very few examples: there’s no longer a legally protected right to abortion. Countless laws across our country police, how woman you must look or be to enter a public bathroom. We know with certainty the president and countless people around him are pedophiles and rapists. Women’s participation in the workforce has been rolled back to 1980s levels. The pressure to be thin is higher now than 10 years ago.
If someone you know has bought into the MRA line–broach specific details like these, not misty tag lines or impalpable vibes. How okay are they with concrete unfreedoms like the examples in this post? Often, not very–and that’s an essential thin end of the wedge.
(The same goes for other categories, of race, ethnicity, sexual identity, etc.)
Read The Handmaid’s Tale. That’s what they want. That’s why feminism exists. Because until very recently, women were considered property.
Feminism is simply the idea that women are fully functioning adults and should have the right to make decisions about every aspect of their lives, from their body to their health to their finances to their jobs. It’s absurd that there are still people out there, women out there, who don’t understand that their very personhood in the eyes of the law was fought and bled for by the very feminists they are so quick to disassociate from. And that this personhood is what these people want to undo. They want us to be property again. And we must fight against this like our lives depend on it, because guess what, they DO.
Being property can kill you. In so many ways. Don’t want any more kids? Bad luck, that’s your husband’s decision. Get sick? Your husband decides what treatment you receive and what your doctors tell you. Don’t want to marry the brutal town drunk? Not your call, your father has sold you to him, and that’s your life from now on, because forget about divorce or even separation, because you have no money, can’t earn money and can’t own property without your husband’s permission.
That’s what they want to go back to. Women who don’t say no because they can’t. Legally. Women with no power, resources or agency. Women with no personhood. Obedient domestic servants who aren’t allowed to say no to sex. Think about that. And tell me that’s not a complete nightmare.
Thirty two seconds later, Sherlock's phone was ringing. He rolled his eyes and picked up.
"Where are you?" Mycroft asked, anxiety plain in his voice.
"I... Baker Street. I'm fine."
A very confused, heavy silence followed.
"You're... fine?"
"Yes. Old age must be taking your hearing."
Mycroft didn't pay the jab any mind.
"Why did you say that?" He asked instead, referring to the text message.
"I just wanted you to know," Sherlock replied simply, glad that at the moment Mycroft couldn't see the color rising in his face. "Don't make a big deal out of it, Mycroft."
Mycroft sighed deeply.
"You're going to be the death of me, little brother."
"Don't ever forget it," Sherlock answered, smirking as he ended the phone call.
In Sherlock's lap, an open scrapbook showed a picture of two boys in the backyard of their 1970s home-- one, a teenager, taller but heavier, with a playfully antagonistic arm loosely wrapped around the neck of the younger boy, whose blinding grin and messy brown curls displayed that while his smaller hands gripped those of his brother's around his neck, they'd just been rough housing and laughing. They looked so happy.
