(A quick fluffy ficlet. More and tags under the cut)
A quiet rumble of thunder sounded far off as John fished out his keys, switching his umbrella to his right hand and unlocking the door to 221 with his left. Just his luck that it would pour his whole walk home, showers only slowing now that he’d reached his destination.
He shook out his brolly and put it in the holder by the door, hung his coat on the hook at the base of the stairs, and shook himself off to dispel the few water droplets clinging to his legs.
Giggles and answering murmurs floated down from the first storey, and John couldn’t help but smile as he climbed the steps. He never knew what to expect when he got home from work — just yesterday he’d arrived to find an unlikely concert, with Sherlock playing “Redwing” on his violin fiddle-style, while Rosie shook tambourines in each hand while blowing full force into a neon pink plastic kazoo.
Some days it was near silence, Sherlock buried in a book while Rosie colored in her My First Science Activity Book. John had found them in the middle of tea parties and plush toy interrogations (attempting to ferret out the location of a lost princess Elsa crown), and even curled up, fast asleep on the couch once.
So what would it be today?
He paused on the landing, listening to the conversation in the kitchen. He never felt guilty about this kind of eavesdropping, treasuring the little moments between Sherlock and Rosie he happened to witness unnoticed.
Sherlock’s voice, soft and calm: “Alright, Petal, let’s get those safety goggles on.”
“Safety gobbles on,” Rosie affirmed cheerfully.
Ah. An experiment, then.
“Good. I’m going to do this part, because the water is very hot. Sit back a little. Alright, we’ll fill this up just a bit … okay. Quickly, let’s take a look — see how the water is so hot it’s turning to gas? Do you remember what that gas is called?”
“Steam!” she announced triumphantly.
“Very good!” Sherlock praised. “And what is the steam doing?”
“Uh… going up in the air?”
“That’s right, the steam is rising. Now, I need you to be my helper. Can you put that plate on top here?”
“Like this?”
“Yes, that’s perfect.”
“Can I put the ice on now?”
“Not yet, we need to give it a few moments first. The steam still wants to rise, but we just blocked it with the plate. Now the hot steam is going to collect on the bottom of the plate. That’s called condensation.”
“Conversation?”
“Con-den-sation,” Sherlock enunciated patiently.
“Con-den-sation.”
“Spot on. So we have hot steam — condensation — on the bottom of the plate. What do you think will happen when we put the cold ice cubes on the top of the plate? It’s alright if you aren’t sure, that’s why we’re doing the experiment. But with everything you already know, you can make an educated guess. That’s called a hypothesis.”
John could practically see Rosie thinking, her little eyebrows pulled together in concentration beneath her tiny safety glasses.
After a few moments she began hesitantly, “I hy-poth-esis that —”
“You hypothesize that… ” Sherlock gently corrected.
“Oh. I hy-pothe-size the ice will melt.”
“Ah, a very good hypothesis, indeed, Rosie. Very smart.” Although John couldn’t see Sherlock, he could hear the grin in his voice. “Now this is my favorite part, we get to find out together.”
John shook his head in amazement, affection washing over him. The person Sherlock had once been, aloof and cold, defending himself with a façade of disinterest and hostility, seemed surreal now. Hre in the cozy confines of their home, the madman John had agreed to share a flat with a decade ago had practically turned into a teddy bear, especially when it came to his step-daughter.
There had been a time John thought he’d never have this, that they’d never have this: that he and Sherlock would never be more than just friends, that he’d never allow himself to love and be loved again, that Rosie would never have two wonderful, doting parents.
Now, he came home every day to a flat full of love and a family he’d once only dreamed of.
There was the sound of ice cubes being dropped gently onto ceramic and an almost-whispered, “look.”
“Papa!” Rosie gasped. “It’s raining! It’s raining in the jar!”
Sherlock laughed warmly at her genuine wonder, and John’s heart filled with overwhelming love. He couldn’t hold back any longer. “What have we here?” he said, stepping into the kitchen with a smile.
“Daddy!” Rosie exclaimed, and she pushed back from the table quickly.
“Careful, Petal,” Sherlock gently chided, his hand hovering over her back, ready to steady her as she jumped down off her chair. Riotous blonde curls in a tiny lab apron and goggles launched into John’s arms.
“Daddy, we’re making rain!”
“Rain?” John chuckled, kissing the top of her head before setting her down. “Don’t we have enough of that outside?” He leaned down to steal a kiss from Sherlock as well, forehead bumping the top edge of his safety glasses as their lips met.
Sherlock smiled and helped Rosie back into her seat. The table was spread with wide-mouth glass jars, shaving cream, food coloring, ice cubes, and pitchers of water.
“We’ve been doing ‘speriments, Daddy!”
“Thought it was an appropriate day to learn a bit more about the weather,” Sherlock said, shuffling aside some child-friendly diagrams depicting cloud-types to retrieve some art Rosie had done.
“That’s wonderful, Darling,” John said, smiling at the crayon drawing of the three of them in stick-figure form beneath a big sun and blue sky. He turned and affixed it to the fridge with a magnet.
“Papa, can we do the cloud ‘speriment one more time? To show Daddy?”
“Absolutely,” Sherlock agreed, grabbing a clean jar. “But I think I forgot how it goes… can you tell me?”
John watched as Rosie helped Sherlock to collect the items they needed. They filled the jar with water first, then Sherlock guided Rosie to hold the can of shaving cream, his large, well-manicured fingers covering Rosie’s tiny purple sparkly ones as they squirted a big “cloud” on top of the water. Then, hand-over-hand in the same fashion, Sherlock helped her gently drop dots of blue food coloring on the foam.
“You won’t believe this, Daddy!” Rosie said with a grin, then looked to Sherlock knowingly, delighted they shared a secret that John was only just going to learn.
John pursed his lips to stop himself from smiling, trying to school his expression so she’d know he was taking it seriously. He raised his eyebrows and let his jaw drop in surprise as the color percolated down through the shaving cream, streaking through the water like rain.
“That’s amazing!” John exclaimed, and Rosie’s face lit up.
“Be right back!” she announced, then climbed back down off of her chair and ran upstairs to her room.
John looked at Sherlock in awe. “You really are amazing. Absolutely amazing.”
“It’s just primary school science,” Sherlock said dismissively, removing his safety glasses and standing to move the jars to the sink.
“That’s not what I mean, and you know it.” John wrapped his arms around Sherlock, pressed his chest into Sherlock’s back, and tenderly placed a kiss below his ear.
“By the end she was practically running it all without me.” He murmured, turning his head to nuzzle into John. “Your daughter is brilliant, John.”
“Your daughter is brilliant,” John whispered in Sherlock’s ear, squeezing him tighter to emphasize the point. “Despite her genetics,” he laughed, “so it’s obviously nurture, not nature on this one.”
The sound of running feet above them made John pull away. “No running on the stairs!” he called authoritatively.
Rosie skidded to a halt in the middle of the sitting room, then spun to face them.
“But the sun is out, Daddy! I have one more ‘speriment to show you!”
John blinked and let go of Sherlock, and they both turned to see. Indeed, warm beams of light now shone in through the tall windows, and birds sang cheerfully outside.
“Papa says this is what happens after a storm.”
John looked at Sherlock inquisitively, but his only answer was a small half-smile Sherlock couldn’t keep from tugging at his lips.
Rosie placed a small prism down on the desk, directly in a bright beam of light, and the room was instantly washed in stripes of color.
If ever there was a better metaphor for his life, John could not fathom it. Here in this flat, with the two people he loved more than life itself… Dreams truly were found at the end of rainbows after all, and there could be no rainbow without a storm first.
Sherlock’s arm looped around John’s waist, drawing him close, as if he knew what John was thinking. Of course he did, he always did. The kiss they shared was chaste but full of emotion, mindful of the small person who giggled and covered her eyes with her hands.
“Well come on, then,” John said rolling his eyes in mock exasperation before a grin broke out over his face, and they bent together to lift her into a hug when she ran into their waiting arms.
During an investigation down by the Thames, a duckling imprints on Sherlock. He tries to shoo the little creature away to no avail. John returns home from the surgery to find they now have a pet.
Sherlock quickly becomes smitten with the little ball of fluff, as John is quick to find out.
“What are you and Quackers getting up to today?”
“Quackers?” Sherlock hugged the tiny yellow ball of fluff to himself protectively, and shot John a withering look. “This is Cornelius, John. He’s a highly intelligent water fowl and I’d prefer you not make a mockery of him with such ridiculous caricatured names.”
“It’s a DUCKLING, Sherlock. It doesn’t know what I’m saying.”
“Cornelius knows.”
In other news, pretty sure I’ve lost my own crackers ;)
