Two Hundred and Twenty-One Baker Streets (36 page)

“I think I’ve heard enough,” Michaels said, unclasping the handcuff from his front belt loop. “You’re coming with me, miss.” Michaels slapped the cuffs around her petite, pale wrists and headed out the door with Mrs. Peppard latched in front. She released a guttural laugh, then began to sob.

“Watson, good work. And you”—he pointed at Sherlock— “you should consider another line of work besides dentistry. I think you have a knack for this.”

I shot a pleading glance to Sherlock, knew full well he would love nothing more than to take this opportunity to talk about his grandeur, about all the cases he had solved, but instead he turned away, smiled, reached for his hat and coat, and said, “We all have our secrets.”

A friend and fellow editor, Jenni’s a new talent in the short fiction world, with a number of anthology credits to her name. I was hugely pleased to be able to get her on board. ‘Parallels’ takes the anthology’s concept to its bleeding limit, not only wholly reinventing Holmes and Watson—as teenaged girls, no less—but giving us an alternate Holmes story
itself full of alternate Holmes stories.
It’s almost frighteningly meta, and is a perfect finish to the anthology. Enjoy.

S
UDDENLY
,
IT ALL
made sense to John Watson. Sherlock’s true nature: the clues had all been there.

His pale skin, his piercing grey eyes, the way he mesmerised John and others around him. Sherlock always had preferred the dark.

John thought of the many times they ’d stayed awake all night, talking, smoking, following leads, chasing criminals through the gaslit streets of London. Had he ever seen Sherlock during daylight? He didn’t think so.

As John watched Sherlock hold the unconscious Moriarty in his arms, teeth sunk into the master criminal’s neck, crouching with his long black coat spread out behind him like the wings of some enormous bat, he faced the horrifying realisation: Sherlock Holmes was a vampire.

And John—trapped in the sewers with no way out, with dawn still hours away—John would be his next victim.

“I
T
’
S GOOD
.” C
HARLOTTE
’
S
words broke Jane out of her reverie. Watching over her friend’s shoulder as the girl read her work, Jane had been lulled into a trance by the familiar paragraphs and the soft hum of the computers in the I.T. teaching room. It took a moment for her to process her friend’s words.

“It’s awful. I’m sorry you had to read it!”

Charlotte smiled. “These people don’t seem to think so.” She pointed to the feedback section at the bottom of the webpage. “Logically, awful writing probably wouldn’t get you nine hundred hits in one week.”

Jane shrugged.

“To put it in perspective, that’s nearly three times the number of people who go to this school. Reading your fanfiction. Believe
them
, if you don’t believe me.”

“There’s no accounting for taste,” Jane mumbled, but she was pleased by the praise. Charlotte did not give compliments lightly.

“Your public loves you! Listen.” Charlotte began to read the feedback out loud, putting on different voices for each comment, and Jane cringed, looking around to check they were alone in the computer room.

A trio of Year Fours gathered around a PC terminal playing the latest first-person shooter, but showed no signs of having noticed Charlotte’s pantomime of fannish glee:

MrsWatson: Vamplock is my favourite flavour of Sherlock. Can’t believe we have to wait another week to find out if Sherlock killed those girls! Or did Moriarty do it?

Tea And Johnlock: Oh noes! I can’t believe it ended here! Moar plz.

BakerStreetRegular: My new sexuality is Vampire Hunter Moriarty.

221Baby: I wish I could write fanfic like this! I wish the writers on the show could write like this. Plainjane, I love you.

Charlotte grabbed the smaller girl in an overdramatic hug at ‘plainjane, I love you,’ lanky limbs and long black hair flying everywhere, and Jane screeched in surprise.

“Oh, plainjane!” cried Charlotte. The year fours looked around accusingly at the noise, but seemed to dismiss this as typical sixth-form behaviour and went back to their shoot ’em up.

Jane disentangled herself from her friend, who always smelt faintly of coffee and cigarettes: Charlotte’s two favourite vices. “Do you really have to read
all
my fanfic?”

“Can’t your best friend take an interest in your hobbies? Anyway, how I am supposed to work out why Eric Sadler would take your notebook full of dirty fanfiction unless I study the subject?”

“He took it because he’s a scumbag. My scumbag ex who wants to embarrass me horribly, a bit like what you’re doing right now. And
hey
! Who said it was dirty?” Jane could feel herself blushing.

“Well, you won’t tell me what’s in it. What am I supposed to assume?”

“It’s private, okay?” It was hard to say ‘no’ to Charlotte—the girl was a star student and proficient in five languages, but Jane often found herself wondering if Charlotte knew what ‘no’ meant in any of them.

“Spoilsport. Go on. We’ve known each other forever. What have you got to hide from me?”

“I just can’t tell you.” It was impossible to hide anything from Charlotte for long, but this time, Jane had to. She really had to.

“Please?” Charlotte actually fluttered her eyelashes.

“You don’t have to know everything all the bloody time!”

Charlotte’s face clouded, and she turned away, back to the words on the computer screen. Even as she said it, Jane knew she was making a mistake. If there was one thing Charlotte hated it was a mystery: she never let go until she had all the answers.

When Ms. McManus had given everyone detention because no-one would own up to the graffiti in the girls’ bathrooms, Charlotte had worked out the culprit. When a masked flasher had turned up at the school disco, Charlotte had worked out his identity. (Mr. Harrison had been working out some issues after his divorce. The school had a new maths teacher now.)

If you had a problem to solve, a mystery to unravel, then Charlotte was your woman. She wouldn’t be nice about it, but she’d find the answers. Such brutal honesty did not win her many friends.

Being seventeen years old and hanging out in the school computer labs writing fanfiction did not win you many friends either, which explained why Charlotte and Jane had remained so close.

It wasn’t the only reason they were friends. In the years since they’d met, sitting next to each other in Harrison’s maths lessons,Jane had come to appreciate Charlotte’s intelligence, her energy, the way she always made life much more interesting.

What she didn’t appreciate about Charlotte was how she sulked when her curiosity was denied.

“Do you want my help or not?” Dark eyebrows knitted together, Charlotte studied the screen, still not meeting Jane’s eyes.

Why had Eric taken the notebook? What was he going to do with it? Where was he keeping it, and how could they get it back? Jane
needed
to get it back. Charlotte would solve this.

“Yes. I do want your help. But I still can’t tell you what’s in the notebook.”

Charlotte sighed, and rolled her eyes. “Then either do something useful or let me study the problem in peace.”

There was no talking to her when she was like this. Jane left Charlotte in the computer lab, reading around ‘plainjane’s’ own unique corner of Sherlock Holmes fandom.

Holmes and Watson had always been beloved characters in pop culture, but recent reboots for TV and film had seen interest soar. The internet was full of fan forums, fanart, cosplay, fanfiction.

Quite a lot of the fan-created works focused on the two characters as each other’s romantic interests—a dynamic some of the reboots did nothing to dispel. The reboots even played with the idea: emphasising Holmes’s jealousy of Watson’s wife, the awkwardness of their living arrangement, or the adulation of Sherlock shown in Watson’s written accounts of their adventures.

Then again, as Jane was always quick to point out, quite a lot of fanfiction did not focus on this homoerotic dynamic. (Hers did.)

Jane herself specialised in alternate universes, or ‘AUs’ for short. AUs took the characters and situations from the original work, and placed them in different worlds, different stories. The characters might be aliens, barbarian warriors or rock stars, but at the end of the day they were still themselves.

Jane had written about Sherlock and Watson as vampires, serial killers, subversive radio hosts, WW2 super-soldiers; the list went on. Jane was, she had to admit, mildly internet-famous for her AUs.

It was a pity that ‘mildly internet-famous’ wasn’t something that one could put on a university application, considering all the hours she’d spent writing fic when she could have been doing her homework, or even doing something her mother would call ‘healthy,’ like playing sports, spending time outdoors or kissing boys.

The fans loved her though—‘plainjane’ had quite a following. It fascinated Jane that even AUs where the characters had completely normal, mundane lives could win a huge readership if enough love and attention were put into the details, the characterisation, the dialogue. Coffee-shop AUs, for some reason, were quite trendy. Perhaps because young fans of the shows with plenty of writing time on their hands were more likely to be able to write their way around a coffee shop than an investment bank or a lawyer’s office. Jane had lost count of the number of fics she’d written on her laptop at Starbucks.

Jane’s own coffee-shop story, a multi-chapter epic titled ‘Where the Barista Knows Your Name,’ was one of her most popular works. She was genuinely proud of it, unlike so much of her other work she’d never quite got around to deleting online. That was the problem with being even mildly internet-famous. All your earliest mistakes stayed around to haunt you.

When Jane was about halfway down the road to the bus-stop home, she stopped as a sudden thought hit her.

Oh, god,
she thought,
please don’t let Charlotte find the Star Force fic.

Excerpt from ‘Where The Barista Knows Your Name’ (subtitle: ‘And Everything Else About You, Just By Looking At Your Shoes’), Chapter One, published by plainjane on fanfictionhouse.net, category: Literature: Sherlock Holmes: AUs, 12
^th
July 2014.

Keywords: coffee shop AU, character: Sherlock Holmes, character: John Watson, angst, fluff, John/Sherlock. With thanks to beta readers singlecrow and ladymoonray!–plainjane

T
HE NEW BARISTA
was getting on John Watson’s nerves. He didn’t smile, he didn’t tell the patrons to ‘have a nice day!’ but the customers loved him. They loved his party trick. John seemed to be the only patron it didn’t impress. “I’ll have my usual; and what does she want?” asked one girl with pink hair and a nose piercing, pushing forward a blonde who smiled and blushed prettily.

The man (
Sherlock Holmes
was the name on his tag) studied her, but only for a moment before turning back to the espresso machine. “She’ll have the double espresso Americano—the ink on her hands and the bags under her eyes show she’s been up all night studying for something, probably... some kind of veterinary sciences exam, going by the cat, dog and yes, that is rabbit fur on her clothes.

I’m adding a vanilla caramel shot. She wants a sugar boost, but prefers vanilla notes to citrus or cocoa, judging by her perfume. ”

“He’s good!” The girls giggled in triumph and ran to the end of the bar to await their coffees, making far too much noise, in John’s hungover opinion.

He stared mournfully into his decaff latte. He’d wanted it caffeinated, but he hadn’t wanted to prove the smug barista right.
He thinks he knows me
, thought John.
He’s only just met me.

Well not ‘only just.’ To be fair, they’d been dancing this dance for a whole week now. John would come in every day, first for his morning coffee, and then later, for a tomato mozzarella bagel and lunchtime caffeine hit.

Before Sherlock’s arrival, this had been the best coffee shop within ten minutes of the hospital where John worked.

Until the Battle of the Decaff Latte.

Until John had lied to the barista seven days ago, insisting that he did indeed want decaff, just to wipe the smug grin off the bastard’s face. Oh, the man hadn’t said anything about it at the time, but you could tell it bothered him. They’d barely exchanged any words since, but there had been a battle of wits going on...

On Wednesday, Sherlock the barista had played dirty.

He’d brought over a regular latte to John’s table, with just the right amount of foam, and with one of those plastic-wrapped, caramelised biscuits you get with coffee, that John adored but could never find in the supermarket. John had never seen tables waited at the café in all his years as a customer, but the barista insisted (sir) that wasn’t this his drink (sir) and actually apologised for messing up John’s order, trying to take away John’s decaff and replace it with the regular coffee.

John gritted his teeth as he remembered insisting that no, decaff was exactly what he wanted. He could swear the barista had waved the regular latte (which had smelled amazing) under his nose a few times, just to really rub it in.

At least in this seat next to the counter, he could enjoy the coffee aromas. Rich, dark, roasted—it smelled like freshly-brewed heaven. Here he could also hear the espresso machine singing its tempting siren wail. Oh, god, he was losing his mind...

One mozzarella bagel and one unsatisfying coffee later, John dropped his paper cup into the bin outside the cafe, and found himself looking up into grey smoke and darker, greyer eyes behind it. John was surprised to find himself thinking how beautiful these eyes were, but stopped when he realised who they belonged to.

The barista inhaled from a long, thin cigarette and, being tall, bent down to John’s level. “Why did you lie to me?”

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, with dawn still disappearing from the sky, Jane met Charlotte at the back gates of the school.