Be sure to tag each post with #teamlavender and #prompt # (ex: #prompt 1)
Do NOT tag these posts with #shernanigans
Blaah I am so sleepy I cannot write anything good. Or short, apparently.
I will nap, and then try for those bonus questions. Oh god, where is my bed. Where am I. What.
-
Prompt: Geek Interpreter
“We’ve lost eyes on 221B, Mr. Holmes.”
If Mycroft had been a man of lesser manners, he might have groaned. Maybe thrown up his arms and thrown around a few tea trays. But, being in fact Mycroft Holmes after all, he simply exhaled with just enough impatience to tell his secretary, Hestia (was her name for this month), that he was not in the mood for Sherlock-sitting today.
“He found the camera?”
“Yes, Mr. Holmes.”
“I shouldn’t have had it in the coffeemaker. I knew eventually he’d run out of Bunsen burners.”
“Yes, Mr. Holmes.”
“How long?”
“Three hours fourteen minutes. And counting.”
“…Excuse me?”
“James Cooper is new, Mr. Holmes, he didn’t know the protocol. Spying on two men in their flat didn’t seem urgent to him.”
“No, of course it wouldn’t”
“I believe the word he used was, ‘disturbing.’”
“Yes, mustn’t offend Mr. Cooper’s delicate sensitivities. Meanwhile, in the three hours fifteen minutes Sherlock Holmes has been let loose into the world, England may have fallen. Has my brother been found?”
“…No.”
“Fire Cooper.”
“Mr. Holmes, James Cooper just became a father three months ago, and his wife doesn’t earn anywhere near enough as a schoolteacher to support the both of them, plus a newborn baby. Everybody makes mistakes.”
“This is unusual. Are you experience a sudden awakening of human compassion? Or are you perhaps having some sort of medical emergency?”
“Neither, Mr. Holmes. But when you sacked Phillips you told me to remind you about these things next time. And I also sent Cooper out to locate Sherlock himself. He should be reporting in any moment now.”
“Ah, yes. Of course. Tell me, Hestia, is Dr. Watson still at work?”
“No, he returned at noon, and our CCTV south of Baker Street shows them getting into a cab together and driving away two hours ago. Wherever Sherlock is, John is probably with him.”
“Well that’s something at least.”
—-
It was an hour before Hestia came knocking on Mycroft’s office door again. She was holding a sheaf of papers in her perfectly manicured hands.
“Surveillance footage?” Mycroft picked up the top sheet. His eyebrows climbed up his forehead to burrow in his scalp.
The grainy photograph seemed to have been taken on a cell phone. There was a crowd of spectators in what looked to be Shaftesbury Ave by the architecture. All gaping openly at a blue man with a sword fighting two black-clad ninjas. On second glance it was clear from their posture and the wrinkles on their costumes who hid under those masks.
“What in heaven’s name are they doing now?”
“Mr. Cooper said it was something about comic books. He also determined that it was not dangerous or illegal.”
Mycroft frowned at a photograph of Sherlock wrestling a teenager wearing a leotard and a plastic set of horns on his head. He absently waved at Hestia to leave.
A picture of John halfheartedly punching a man whose beard extended, it seemed, down into his collar. He was wearing a sequined mask. The bearded man, not John. John was wearing an expression of intense shame and embarrassment. And also a ninja outfit that was suspiciously authentic.
Mycroft made a mental note to check up with the British Museum of Natural History.
