Johnlock January 2025 #25: Fire
Written for prompts posted by @chriscalledmesweetie.
Father and daughter have a difficult conversation. Chapter rating T.
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As I kind of expected, it’s one of the kiddos at the day nursery that eventually drops me in it.
Sherlock’s on a case that takes him out of town – something to do with antiquity thefts, though before it’s over I fully expect there’ll be a poisoner, an unfaithful spouse and a forgery involved – and it’s just Rosie and me for supper tonight. They call this quality time, right? Reading aloud, tussling, watching telly together, playing pretend games with her toy unicorn and the Scientist Barbie that Molly brought at Christmas.
No fear. Apparently she’s been throwing a strop all day at the nursery – refusing to go down for her nap, calling one of the other kids names. When I hold up the storybook, she informs me (very haughtily) that’s for babies, and when I suggest mushy peas for supper she announces that she hates them, although she’d been asking for them every night just last week. And, oh, by the way, she’s not going back to the day nursery, and then she bursts into tears.
Well, that’s a metabolism. Much as she loves the days when she can stay at Baker Street and hang about with Sherlock, she’s always been chatty about her nursery friends, and proud of the artwork she brings home (the Sherlock portrait is pretty recognisable, me not so much). There’s something going on, and I sit down on the carpet to get at her level.
“Rosie?” It takes a few tries to get her to look at me, hitching out sobs and snot in equal measure. “Why don’t you want to go back?”
“Ayana said you called someone a name. Was that the person who was mean to you?”
“M-hm.” She sniffles, and I find a hanky.
No surprise there. I never did like anything I heard about Oona, who seems to be always telling the younger kids that they’re not old enough to play with certain toys, or sniffing at them for not knowing their alphabet. The staff are supposed to catch this kind of thing, but I’ve lived long enough to know how people like that slip under the radar, and it’s the people who react to them that get called out. I resign myself to the idea that there’s a conference with Ayana in my future.
‘Here. Blow your nose and tell me.”
She blows mostly into the handkerchief, and I manage to clean off my hand with the part she hasn’t used. “She asked why my mum never comes to pick me up, an’ I said I haven’t got a mum.”
I feel the floor going out from under me. Here it comes, I think.
“And she said everyone has a -- a mum, ‘cos you get a baby when a mum and da kiss and take a bath together.”
A reasonable enough inference, I guess, at an age when the only reason you take off all your clothes with someone else nearby is to be bathed. “It’s um, something like that.”
“And that if I was – wasn’t a stupid baby I’d know that, and I said Willa has Terry-Da and Colin-Da, and Oona said that was stupid too, and –” She sniffs again, but I can tell the tears are drying up now that the story’s coming out.
“Well, Oona’s a bully, and also she sounds like a bigoted little gobshite.”
Oops. “That’s a word you have to be grown up to use. Like driving an automobile.” I can only pray that sinks in. “Anyway, Rosie. Um. You did have a mum. She just – isn’t here now.” (Shite. This is no easier than I thought it would be.)
Her voice is very small. I can do this, I tell myself.
“Come up here on the sofa. There – snuggle up, and I’ll tell you. Remember when you asked me what married was?”
“No.” Well, it’s been several months now, which to be fair adds up to about a fifth of her life. “But I know.”
“Okay, well – your Da was married, and her name was Mary, just like your middle name.”
“Rosamund Mary Watson.” She’s very proud of having three names (“some kids only have two”).
“Right. And you can have children without being married, and you can be married without having children, but we had you.” A little of both in our case, I suppose, but we could skip that complication for now. “And she – she loved you very much, but she --”
I swallow hard. God knows I’ve seen enough of Death; I should be used to the bastard, but right now, I don’t want to introduce him to my not-quite-four-year-old daughter in the Baker Street sitting room."Rosie, people are made to live a good long time. You know how Mrs. Hudson has grey in her hair?" When she hasn't been to the stylist in a while, anyway. "And Mrs. Turner's hands are all spotty? Those are things that happen when you've lived a lot of years."
She nods, though I'm not sure how much she's taking in. "But sometimes people don't get that many years. They get very sick, or have an accident, and they can't stay with us, no matter what we do. And we say they're dead." It takes a few breaths before I go on. "That's what happened to your mum. She didn't want to leave you."
Rosie digests this, then looks up. “She come back some day?”
It takes a little longer to get control over my voice this time, and I don’t know if I’m hugging her for her sake or my own. “No, Rosie, she’s not coming back. She can’t. But she would want you to know that having you was one of the very, very best things she did.”
“I love her,” says Rosie.
I hold her tighter, and think of what Mycroft told me during an unexpected car ride, not long after I confronted Sherlock about investigating “the case of Mary Watson.” In light of a discussion I have had with my brother, I feel you should be acquainted with my review of the Norbury incident… That was when I learned her past was never going to be really past -- that there had been a bidding war for her head, and that being Mary Watson was a joy she bought – or really only leased – at the risk of me, or Rosie, becoming collateral damage. I think of how she deceived me, and maybe herself. Of Mycroft saying Feel secure that any danger to you or your daughter from that quarter, Doctor, has been eliminated.
And I think of how she might not have been what I wanted, but she was what I needed when she found me. I think of her coaxing me to forgive Sherlock, when I wouldn’t have listened to anyone else; how it was because of that remembered conversation that I let him back in again, after she was gone. I close my eyes, and on the backs of the lids there’s the image of a memory stick, scorching and blackening in the fire.
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