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kasihyaHahaha so! I meant to spend the night watching Community, and I ended up getting through a few episodes before deciding that my time would be better spent writing another 'Molly is the Doctor's companion, and this is what it looks like to outsiders' story. Because if I started the story I have in mind from her POV, right this moment, it wouldn't get finished. So I wrote one for Christmas instead, in honor of the snow we are finally (sort of) getting up here.
I'm a lot less stressed to pieces by writing silly things. Like this! This was such fun to write. Such fun. And it only took three hours, which is unheard-of fast for me. I don't quite know why these fandoms have brought out both the desire to write fanfiction, and the ability to finish stories, but I'm perfectly happy to go along with it.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Title: Good King Wenceslaus Looked Out, On The Feast of Stephen
Fandom: Doctor Who/Sherlock crossover
Wordcount: 3,127
Rating: PG
Summary: In which Christmas Eve at 221 Baker Street is interrupted by world-saving shenanigans; possibly minor spoilers for the end of series 6
EDITED VERSION NOW ON AO3 This one is so much better, Jesus.
They host a party on Christmas Eve, which is both an ordinary Christmas party, and a sort of apology for all parties involved: Sherlock will behave to make up for pulling a disappearing act, Lestrade and Sally will attend and bring the champagne to make up for doubting him. (Well, Lestrade, anyway; John suspects that Sally is only along as an excuse to search the flat for drugs and check up on John’s mental health.) It was also supposed to be a thank-you and appreciation party for Molly, (John’s idea) because if Sherlock was going to try to be a decent human being to a lot of people, he might as well get it all over with at once, but when John called Molly, she responded to the invitation with a nebulous ‘I’ll try’ followed by a peculiar rustling sound and then an ‘I’ve got to go – sorry, it’s lovely to hear from you, John.’
John steals Sherlock’s violin from his room and thrusts it upon him halfway through the evening, because when he’s not scraping away at it to punctuate some clever remark, he’s very good at it, and can sometimes be persuaded to play carols. Sherlock pretends to protest, but John can tell that he’s secretly pleased by the attention that it bestows upon him. He stands at the window for dramatic effect, looking over the snowy street while Mrs. Hudson regales Lestrade with the story her late husband, and Lestrade tries to shut up his inner policeman just for this evening in order to not wince his way through the tale, and Sally and Harry sit on the couch laughing while they analyze John, and John himself watches the way Sherlock’s fingers fly on the neck of the violin.
Harry starts everyone singing when he begins to play Good King Wenceslaus, and it’s all going so smoothly and companionably in spite of the mismatched assortment of people in the room that John begins to worry. He tells himself that this is what comes of being with Sherlock, that he just can’t let down his guard anymore, and that after the last two miserable Christmases that he’d had, he is entitled to sit in a room full of the people he considers family and just be happy for an evening. That’s normal.
Still, it comes as almost a relief when Sherlock breaks off abruptly during Auld Lang Syne and stares out the window. He sets the violin down on the desk and opens the window a crack; as everyone else in the room stops singing, they can hear sounds like someone setting off a series of potato cannons, followed by shouting and laughter.
‘What is it?’ John gets up and joins him, jostling him aside to see what’s going on down below. A cold draft hits his hands where they grip the windowsill for balance when he sees – something that looks like, anyway, but it can’t be – no, yes, that is an eight-foot long … model … spaceship … flying along Baker Street at about waist level. He can just barely make out rows of tiny windows as it flies past the building, shedding bright green light that casts odd shadows on the falling snow.
‘Interesting,’ says Sherlock. He pushes off from the window and makes for the door, grabbing his coat and scarf.
‘Has someone been shot?’ asks Mrs. Hudson with great interest. Harry’s eyes widen.
‘No, no I don’t think so,’ says John. ‘It’s, um, I have no idea actually, hold on a tic.’ Down below, two figures go running past, holding what looks like a fishing net stretched across the width of the street while they shout to each other.
‘They can just fly over it, can’t they?’ says the shorter of the two, in a voice that should be familiar.
‘Not while they’re this size, the thermonuclear reactor would melt if they tried to feed the engines that much power. The casing’s too thin,’ shouts the man in the Santa hat from across the street. John hears the potato-cannon noise again, coming closer. He’s not stupid, he can put two and two together: there are a couple of lunatics, out on Christmas Eve, trying to catch a – a hovercraft of some kind, some sort of military experiment gone awry – with something that looks like it couldn’t even restrain a kitten. John runs out after Sherlock, takes back what he thought about it being too normal of an evening, and prays that Sherlock can explain to him why he feels trapped in a high-budget sci-fi movie. Their guests protest at the two of them dashing off in the middle of the party, it’s bad form and Harry wants to know if they’re all about to get murdered, but he has long since accepted that this is his life, for better or for worse.
He nearly bangs straight into Sherlock coming out of the front door; he’d halted just on the stoop, shielding his eyes against the falling snow and watching. Directly in front of them now stand the two figures he’d seen from above, and John feels a jolt in his stomach as he recognizes the closer one as Molly Hooper. Sans the long white coat, and smelling faintly of burnt hair – half of her ponytail is missing. She glances sideways at them and smiles.
‘Hi Sherlock! Hi. John. Can you, it would be good if you’d just duck inside for a moment, for your own good,’ she says. The poom-pause-poom-pause-poom noise increases so as to be nearly deafening; John stops breathing for a moment as he is transported out of England in the winter and back to Afghanistan in the summer, guns firing around him and people shouting and adding to the confusion. He presses his hands to his head and squeezes his eyes shut. A hand gripping his elbow pulls him to the side, and he opens his eyes in time to see the strange, oversized vehicle come to zooming down the street again. He is back in England, and Sherlock has dragged him into the doorway, where they are flanked by Lestrade, Sally, and Harry, covered various degrees of outerwear to watch the scene unfolding on the street.
Molly braces herself, and on the opposite sidewalk, her companion does the same, holding the fishing net spread out as high as they can. The spaceship – no, it’s not a spaceship, spaceships don’t happen and they’re not that small – flashes past their door in a blur, dragging Molly and her companion backwards a few feet, then comes to an impossibly quick halt. It hovers in the air, making a humming noise, within the fishing net which now begins to shimmer against the black skin of the ship.
The man on the other side of the street shouts joyfully, and runs to meet Molly at the center of the road and join the two ends of the net together. He passes Molly four blue devices the size of apples, and as John watches in disbelief, she attaches them to the edges of the net. Although small, they seem to serve as some kind of weight; when she finishes, the not-spaceship sinks down softly into the snow, and the blue devices start to pulse. John could swear they look smug, even though they’re just … electronics, or something close to that, anyway.
Sherlock walks out the door again, leaving a sudden gust of cold air where he had been shielding John from the elements. John follows. He thinks that if there’s anyone who can pull off making a dramatic entrance after having just been relegated to the sidelines by a spaceship and blue glowey devices, it’s Sherlock, but as it turns out, he’s wrong: Molly’s odd, gangly companion ignores him completely in favor of marching up to the front end of the spaceship and talking at it.
‘Now that I’ve got your attention, do you think we could maybe have a little chat? You know, without the whole colonizing the planet thing, because really. Really? I know, I know – longest night of the year, it’s all very symbolic, but does anyone actually read the Encyclopedia? I know it’s been published by your time.’
From on top of the spaceship, a small, telescopic speaker emerges. Sherlock mutters something vaguely French under his breath. The noise that emerges from the speakers sounds like anything but.
The man in the Santa hat throws up his hands dramatically. ‘Well of course, there’s your problem, you can’t take the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy seriously if you’re going to invade a planet. And anyway, the correspondent for Earth never met me.’ He grins and adjusts his jacket.
The spaceship-speakers garble something back that sounds like ‘.’ It manages to sound fairly insulting to John’s ears.
‘Yeah, but I like this planet! I’ve got family. And anyway, it’s not just me, this planet is a level five established whatchamacallit , you can’t just go around invading it whenever you feel like.’
Molly folds her arms and looks over her shoulder at us. ‘It’s good to see you all,’ she says, her voice pitched a little higher than normal and her eyes fixed on the man standing just in front of John.
‘Extraterrestrials,’ says he.
She shrugs and smiles.
‘I’m sorry about your home planet,’ says the man to the spaceship. ‘But that’s like me saying ‘Nah, I don’t feel like cleaning house, or even hiring a housekeeper, I’m just going to kick my neighbors out of theirs. It’s not polite. Especially when there’s a lovely planet, uninhabited, practically next door. It’s not quite established yet, you might need to do a bit of terraforming, but trust me. You’d be much better off putting in the effort there.’ He puts his hands behind his head and smiles in a completely benign manner. It’s very different from watching Sherlock smile at people who aren’t John or Mrs. Hudson: it looks like he’s a sociopath with no idea how to operate the correct facial muscles. When this man smiles, it’s obvious that he means it, very sincerely, and that he will convert all of that sincerity into murderous intent at a later date if he does not get the results he wants.
John spares a moment from the sheer improbability of the situation to be very, very worried about Molly’s taste in men.
The spaceship burbles and sputters at him some more, and Molly edges around it to say something in a low voice to the man in the Santa hat.
‘What do you get off him?’ John asks Sherlock.
‘Alien.’
‘What?’
‘Alien. Look at his clothing, it’s obviously a poor attempt at camouflage, just close enough to this time period to not be thought of as out of place by an outside observer, but from the inside, fashion changes from year to year, and that jacket went out of fashion seventy years ago, but it’s not in the right decade to be worn ironically. Yet. Add that to the fact that he’s communicating with what appears to be another species of alien, and unless this is all a very elaborate hoax by Molly to prove that she’s not in love with me anymore, I’d say humanoid extraterrestrial.’
(‘Yeah, Gliese 581 g. Twenty-odd lightyears away, you’d be there by Christmas Day,’ says the alien.)
‘But that’s impossible,’ says John.
‘Merely improbable. I have eliminated all other conclusions, and however unlikely it may seem, it is currently the best explanation I have.’
John can feel a headache coming on, a combination of champagne and life as he knows it continuing to crumble around him in the form of Molly Hooper bending over to talk to the very tiny iridescent lemur that climbs out of the roof of the spaceship. He leaves Sherlock standing on the doorstep and approaches the spaceship cautiously. Molly looks up at him and smiles.
‘That’s a, um …’ he asks.
‘Class Eta Battleship. Apparently,’ she adds, with a glance at the man standing behind her. ‘I don’t really understand it – no, that’s not true. I understand more than you do, and more than he does.’ Her eyes flicker to Sherlock. ‘I meant to come to the party, really. We just got a little sidetracked.’
The man behind her snorts. ‘Just a little. Say, do you think you could help us with something?’ he asks.
John looks him up and down. Yeah, he can kind of see where S was coming from with the outfit thing. ‘Are you really an alien?’ he asks.
‘Well I suppose, if you want to put it that way. It’s a bit ethnocentric, don’t you think? I’m the Doctor, I’m a Time Lord. Merry Christmas, by the way. Love the jumper.’ He beams like an overexcited puppy dog.
‘Thanks,’ says John. He wonders if he just got hit on by an alien, or if it’s just a cultural thing.
‘Um …’ Molly interrupts to gesture down at the spaceship. The lemur-thing and the speaker both sink back into the top, leaving it smooth once more save for a light dusting of snow overtop the fishing net.
The Doctor claps his hands together. ‘Right! Hello, humans!’ he says to the group on the steps. The face that Sherlock makes has to be seen to be believed. ‘So! My companion and I have just saved the world from a rather malignant brand of colonization – again. You’re welcome. Unfortunately, we’ve beached their ship, so to speak, and I need to get it back to my ship in order to set it loose into space before we turn everyone back to their proper size. Would any of you lot mind helping us drag this thing a block or two?’
Mad. He is completely mad. Everyone is mad. Next Christmas, John is going to arrange for something manageably disastrous to happen; that way, at least he knows that to expect. That way, he won’t be trudging along through six inches of snow with his friends and family, attempting to haul a miniature spaceship to an apparently even bigger spaceship parked ‘just around the corner’ while Molly attempts to fend off Sherlock’s questions and explain how she wasn’t quick enough to dodge a laser beam and that’s why she burned her hair, it wasn’t a stylistic choice so he can stop telling her it looks like she’s trying too hard. Lestrade tells her that it suits her, and she gives him a smile that is a lot more confident than John remembers her being.
The weirdness quotient for the evening tops off right about the point where they round the corner where the Doctor swears he has a spaceship, and are confronted by a blue police box instead. The Doctor lets go of their joint burden with one hand to snap his fingers, and the doors open. Then John has to reevaluate his scale of weirdness, because inside the police box is the main deck of a spaceship that looks like the love child of Antoni Gaudi and Charles Babbage. Beside him, Sally swears softly.
They drag the spaceship inside the police box; it makes an unpleasant scraping noise as it exits the snow and enters the hard floor, and it’s a bit of a tight squeeze getting it through the door, but then it’s done, and there are seven people standing inside a single room twice the size of 221 Baker Street. The Doctor abandons them all as soon as it’s done and runs off to the central set of controls, leaving them all sort of staring at each other. ‘I’ll just put in the coordinates and let them off somewhere in the asteroid belt. Molly?’
She turns. ‘I’ll be right here when you’re done. I bought … um …’ Her face, already pink from the cold, turns pinker. ‘When we were on Alaalu, I bought presents, for you and your family. They’re still in my room. Do you think you could give them, for me?’
John didn’t think it was possible for the Doctor to smile any more hugely than he already was, but again, tonight is a night of shattering assumptions. He turns away as Molly flaps her hands at John and his friends, shooing them out of the police box. Sherlock is having none of that; John has to physically seize his wrist and drag him out of there by force. The doors shut behind them, and the box makes a wheezing noise that has John jumping back from surprise. It then proceeds to fade in and out of visibility, until it vanishes. He puts his hand out, but it just isn’t there anymore.
Sherlock tilts his head. Lestrade’s mouth hangs open; Harry has her hands over hers. Sally has her arms crossed and tucked against her body like it will protect her from acknowledging that anything went on out of the ordinary, but John saw the way her eyes lit up when they were standing inside the ship. Molly looks a little embarrassed. For a few seconds, the snow falls in silence.
‘Did that just happen?’ asks Lestrade.
‘God, I hope so,’ says Sally. ‘Else I really need a holiday.’
Harry stretches. ‘My shoulders are telling me it did.’
‘Shall we, um, go back inside then?’ John asks. It feels a little anticlimactic, going back to their rooms and opening presents and such, but such is life. There are always the boring bits after something really exciting has happened; truth be told, he enjoys those parts, if only because they usually mean that Sherlock is still riding the high of a case that’s just finished, but he’s not actually deducing anything or making any special effort to make John feel stupid.
‘Yes. I still have questions,’ Sherlock says to Molly as they all make their way back to 221B. John can make out Mrs. Hudson’s figure, standing on the doorstep and waiting for their return – for all she’d insisted on helping them, he had insisted even more strongly that she not strain her hip any more than was necessary.
‘That’s a change,’ says Molly, with a wry smile just barely visible under the street lamps.
‘You’ve aged four years and two months in the last three and one. Obviously I’m going to be interested.’
‘Well,’ she says. ‘Do you remember when everyone was saying that it was the zombie apocalypse, last year?’
‘I read about it. A lot of cultish nonsense.’
‘And then a few days later, there were those brilliant northern lights.’
John looks up at the sky at the memory, and gets a snowflake in his eye for his pains. ‘Yeah, I remember that,’ he says.
‘Good.’ She turns on the stoop and bounces on her heels. ‘That might have been partially my fault.’
THE END
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I will eventually write the story that Molly mentions at the end. I just need to figure out the part in between the first two-thirds, and the very end.
I'm a lot less stressed to pieces by writing silly things. Like this! This was such fun to write. Such fun. And it only took three hours, which is unheard-of fast for me. I don't quite know why these fandoms have brought out both the desire to write fanfiction, and the ability to finish stories, but I'm perfectly happy to go along with it.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Title: Good King Wenceslaus Looked Out, On The Feast of Stephen
Fandom: Doctor Who/Sherlock crossover
Wordcount: 3,127
Rating: PG
Summary: In which Christmas Eve at 221 Baker Street is interrupted by world-saving shenanigans; possibly minor spoilers for the end of series 6
EDITED VERSION NOW ON AO3 This one is so much better, Jesus.
They host a party on Christmas Eve, which is both an ordinary Christmas party, and a sort of apology for all parties involved: Sherlock will behave to make up for pulling a disappearing act, Lestrade and Sally will attend and bring the champagne to make up for doubting him. (Well, Lestrade, anyway; John suspects that Sally is only along as an excuse to search the flat for drugs and check up on John’s mental health.) It was also supposed to be a thank-you and appreciation party for Molly, (John’s idea) because if Sherlock was going to try to be a decent human being to a lot of people, he might as well get it all over with at once, but when John called Molly, she responded to the invitation with a nebulous ‘I’ll try’ followed by a peculiar rustling sound and then an ‘I’ve got to go – sorry, it’s lovely to hear from you, John.’
John steals Sherlock’s violin from his room and thrusts it upon him halfway through the evening, because when he’s not scraping away at it to punctuate some clever remark, he’s very good at it, and can sometimes be persuaded to play carols. Sherlock pretends to protest, but John can tell that he’s secretly pleased by the attention that it bestows upon him. He stands at the window for dramatic effect, looking over the snowy street while Mrs. Hudson regales Lestrade with the story her late husband, and Lestrade tries to shut up his inner policeman just for this evening in order to not wince his way through the tale, and Sally and Harry sit on the couch laughing while they analyze John, and John himself watches the way Sherlock’s fingers fly on the neck of the violin.
Harry starts everyone singing when he begins to play Good King Wenceslaus, and it’s all going so smoothly and companionably in spite of the mismatched assortment of people in the room that John begins to worry. He tells himself that this is what comes of being with Sherlock, that he just can’t let down his guard anymore, and that after the last two miserable Christmases that he’d had, he is entitled to sit in a room full of the people he considers family and just be happy for an evening. That’s normal.
Still, it comes as almost a relief when Sherlock breaks off abruptly during Auld Lang Syne and stares out the window. He sets the violin down on the desk and opens the window a crack; as everyone else in the room stops singing, they can hear sounds like someone setting off a series of potato cannons, followed by shouting and laughter.
‘What is it?’ John gets up and joins him, jostling him aside to see what’s going on down below. A cold draft hits his hands where they grip the windowsill for balance when he sees – something that looks like, anyway, but it can’t be – no, yes, that is an eight-foot long … model … spaceship … flying along Baker Street at about waist level. He can just barely make out rows of tiny windows as it flies past the building, shedding bright green light that casts odd shadows on the falling snow.
‘Interesting,’ says Sherlock. He pushes off from the window and makes for the door, grabbing his coat and scarf.
‘Has someone been shot?’ asks Mrs. Hudson with great interest. Harry’s eyes widen.
‘No, no I don’t think so,’ says John. ‘It’s, um, I have no idea actually, hold on a tic.’ Down below, two figures go running past, holding what looks like a fishing net stretched across the width of the street while they shout to each other.
‘They can just fly over it, can’t they?’ says the shorter of the two, in a voice that should be familiar.
‘Not while they’re this size, the thermonuclear reactor would melt if they tried to feed the engines that much power. The casing’s too thin,’ shouts the man in the Santa hat from across the street. John hears the potato-cannon noise again, coming closer. He’s not stupid, he can put two and two together: there are a couple of lunatics, out on Christmas Eve, trying to catch a – a hovercraft of some kind, some sort of military experiment gone awry – with something that looks like it couldn’t even restrain a kitten. John runs out after Sherlock, takes back what he thought about it being too normal of an evening, and prays that Sherlock can explain to him why he feels trapped in a high-budget sci-fi movie. Their guests protest at the two of them dashing off in the middle of the party, it’s bad form and Harry wants to know if they’re all about to get murdered, but he has long since accepted that this is his life, for better or for worse.
He nearly bangs straight into Sherlock coming out of the front door; he’d halted just on the stoop, shielding his eyes against the falling snow and watching. Directly in front of them now stand the two figures he’d seen from above, and John feels a jolt in his stomach as he recognizes the closer one as Molly Hooper. Sans the long white coat, and smelling faintly of burnt hair – half of her ponytail is missing. She glances sideways at them and smiles.
‘Hi Sherlock! Hi. John. Can you, it would be good if you’d just duck inside for a moment, for your own good,’ she says. The poom-pause-poom-pause-poom noise increases so as to be nearly deafening; John stops breathing for a moment as he is transported out of England in the winter and back to Afghanistan in the summer, guns firing around him and people shouting and adding to the confusion. He presses his hands to his head and squeezes his eyes shut. A hand gripping his elbow pulls him to the side, and he opens his eyes in time to see the strange, oversized vehicle come to zooming down the street again. He is back in England, and Sherlock has dragged him into the doorway, where they are flanked by Lestrade, Sally, and Harry, covered various degrees of outerwear to watch the scene unfolding on the street.
Molly braces herself, and on the opposite sidewalk, her companion does the same, holding the fishing net spread out as high as they can. The spaceship – no, it’s not a spaceship, spaceships don’t happen and they’re not that small – flashes past their door in a blur, dragging Molly and her companion backwards a few feet, then comes to an impossibly quick halt. It hovers in the air, making a humming noise, within the fishing net which now begins to shimmer against the black skin of the ship.
The man on the other side of the street shouts joyfully, and runs to meet Molly at the center of the road and join the two ends of the net together. He passes Molly four blue devices the size of apples, and as John watches in disbelief, she attaches them to the edges of the net. Although small, they seem to serve as some kind of weight; when she finishes, the not-spaceship sinks down softly into the snow, and the blue devices start to pulse. John could swear they look smug, even though they’re just … electronics, or something close to that, anyway.
Sherlock walks out the door again, leaving a sudden gust of cold air where he had been shielding John from the elements. John follows. He thinks that if there’s anyone who can pull off making a dramatic entrance after having just been relegated to the sidelines by a spaceship and blue glowey devices, it’s Sherlock, but as it turns out, he’s wrong: Molly’s odd, gangly companion ignores him completely in favor of marching up to the front end of the spaceship and talking at it.
‘Now that I’ve got your attention, do you think we could maybe have a little chat? You know, without the whole colonizing the planet thing, because really. Really? I know, I know – longest night of the year, it’s all very symbolic, but does anyone actually read the Encyclopedia? I know it’s been published by your time.’
From on top of the spaceship, a small, telescopic speaker emerges. Sherlock mutters something vaguely French under his breath. The noise that emerges from the speakers sounds like anything but.
The man in the Santa hat throws up his hands dramatically. ‘Well of course, there’s your problem, you can’t take the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy seriously if you’re going to invade a planet. And anyway, the correspondent for Earth never met me.’ He grins and adjusts his jacket.
The spaceship-speakers garble something back that sounds like ‘.’ It manages to sound fairly insulting to John’s ears.
‘Yeah, but I like this planet! I’ve got family. And anyway, it’s not just me, this planet is a level five established whatchamacallit , you can’t just go around invading it whenever you feel like.’
Molly folds her arms and looks over her shoulder at us. ‘It’s good to see you all,’ she says, her voice pitched a little higher than normal and her eyes fixed on the man standing just in front of John.
‘Extraterrestrials,’ says he.
She shrugs and smiles.
‘I’m sorry about your home planet,’ says the man to the spaceship. ‘But that’s like me saying ‘Nah, I don’t feel like cleaning house, or even hiring a housekeeper, I’m just going to kick my neighbors out of theirs. It’s not polite. Especially when there’s a lovely planet, uninhabited, practically next door. It’s not quite established yet, you might need to do a bit of terraforming, but trust me. You’d be much better off putting in the effort there.’ He puts his hands behind his head and smiles in a completely benign manner. It’s very different from watching Sherlock smile at people who aren’t John or Mrs. Hudson: it looks like he’s a sociopath with no idea how to operate the correct facial muscles. When this man smiles, it’s obvious that he means it, very sincerely, and that he will convert all of that sincerity into murderous intent at a later date if he does not get the results he wants.
John spares a moment from the sheer improbability of the situation to be very, very worried about Molly’s taste in men.
The spaceship burbles and sputters at him some more, and Molly edges around it to say something in a low voice to the man in the Santa hat.
‘What do you get off him?’ John asks Sherlock.
‘Alien.’
‘What?’
‘Alien. Look at his clothing, it’s obviously a poor attempt at camouflage, just close enough to this time period to not be thought of as out of place by an outside observer, but from the inside, fashion changes from year to year, and that jacket went out of fashion seventy years ago, but it’s not in the right decade to be worn ironically. Yet. Add that to the fact that he’s communicating with what appears to be another species of alien, and unless this is all a very elaborate hoax by Molly to prove that she’s not in love with me anymore, I’d say humanoid extraterrestrial.’
(‘Yeah, Gliese 581 g. Twenty-odd lightyears away, you’d be there by Christmas Day,’ says the alien.)
‘But that’s impossible,’ says John.
‘Merely improbable. I have eliminated all other conclusions, and however unlikely it may seem, it is currently the best explanation I have.’
John can feel a headache coming on, a combination of champagne and life as he knows it continuing to crumble around him in the form of Molly Hooper bending over to talk to the very tiny iridescent lemur that climbs out of the roof of the spaceship. He leaves Sherlock standing on the doorstep and approaches the spaceship cautiously. Molly looks up at him and smiles.
‘That’s a, um …’ he asks.
‘Class Eta Battleship. Apparently,’ she adds, with a glance at the man standing behind her. ‘I don’t really understand it – no, that’s not true. I understand more than you do, and more than he does.’ Her eyes flicker to Sherlock. ‘I meant to come to the party, really. We just got a little sidetracked.’
The man behind her snorts. ‘Just a little. Say, do you think you could help us with something?’ he asks.
John looks him up and down. Yeah, he can kind of see where S was coming from with the outfit thing. ‘Are you really an alien?’ he asks.
‘Well I suppose, if you want to put it that way. It’s a bit ethnocentric, don’t you think? I’m the Doctor, I’m a Time Lord. Merry Christmas, by the way. Love the jumper.’ He beams like an overexcited puppy dog.
‘Thanks,’ says John. He wonders if he just got hit on by an alien, or if it’s just a cultural thing.
‘Um …’ Molly interrupts to gesture down at the spaceship. The lemur-thing and the speaker both sink back into the top, leaving it smooth once more save for a light dusting of snow overtop the fishing net.
The Doctor claps his hands together. ‘Right! Hello, humans!’ he says to the group on the steps. The face that Sherlock makes has to be seen to be believed. ‘So! My companion and I have just saved the world from a rather malignant brand of colonization – again. You’re welcome. Unfortunately, we’ve beached their ship, so to speak, and I need to get it back to my ship in order to set it loose into space before we turn everyone back to their proper size. Would any of you lot mind helping us drag this thing a block or two?’
Mad. He is completely mad. Everyone is mad. Next Christmas, John is going to arrange for something manageably disastrous to happen; that way, at least he knows that to expect. That way, he won’t be trudging along through six inches of snow with his friends and family, attempting to haul a miniature spaceship to an apparently even bigger spaceship parked ‘just around the corner’ while Molly attempts to fend off Sherlock’s questions and explain how she wasn’t quick enough to dodge a laser beam and that’s why she burned her hair, it wasn’t a stylistic choice so he can stop telling her it looks like she’s trying too hard. Lestrade tells her that it suits her, and she gives him a smile that is a lot more confident than John remembers her being.
The weirdness quotient for the evening tops off right about the point where they round the corner where the Doctor swears he has a spaceship, and are confronted by a blue police box instead. The Doctor lets go of their joint burden with one hand to snap his fingers, and the doors open. Then John has to reevaluate his scale of weirdness, because inside the police box is the main deck of a spaceship that looks like the love child of Antoni Gaudi and Charles Babbage. Beside him, Sally swears softly.
They drag the spaceship inside the police box; it makes an unpleasant scraping noise as it exits the snow and enters the hard floor, and it’s a bit of a tight squeeze getting it through the door, but then it’s done, and there are seven people standing inside a single room twice the size of 221 Baker Street. The Doctor abandons them all as soon as it’s done and runs off to the central set of controls, leaving them all sort of staring at each other. ‘I’ll just put in the coordinates and let them off somewhere in the asteroid belt. Molly?’
She turns. ‘I’ll be right here when you’re done. I bought … um …’ Her face, already pink from the cold, turns pinker. ‘When we were on Alaalu, I bought presents, for you and your family. They’re still in my room. Do you think you could give them, for me?’
John didn’t think it was possible for the Doctor to smile any more hugely than he already was, but again, tonight is a night of shattering assumptions. He turns away as Molly flaps her hands at John and his friends, shooing them out of the police box. Sherlock is having none of that; John has to physically seize his wrist and drag him out of there by force. The doors shut behind them, and the box makes a wheezing noise that has John jumping back from surprise. It then proceeds to fade in and out of visibility, until it vanishes. He puts his hand out, but it just isn’t there anymore.
Sherlock tilts his head. Lestrade’s mouth hangs open; Harry has her hands over hers. Sally has her arms crossed and tucked against her body like it will protect her from acknowledging that anything went on out of the ordinary, but John saw the way her eyes lit up when they were standing inside the ship. Molly looks a little embarrassed. For a few seconds, the snow falls in silence.
‘Did that just happen?’ asks Lestrade.
‘God, I hope so,’ says Sally. ‘Else I really need a holiday.’
Harry stretches. ‘My shoulders are telling me it did.’
‘Shall we, um, go back inside then?’ John asks. It feels a little anticlimactic, going back to their rooms and opening presents and such, but such is life. There are always the boring bits after something really exciting has happened; truth be told, he enjoys those parts, if only because they usually mean that Sherlock is still riding the high of a case that’s just finished, but he’s not actually deducing anything or making any special effort to make John feel stupid.
‘Yes. I still have questions,’ Sherlock says to Molly as they all make their way back to 221B. John can make out Mrs. Hudson’s figure, standing on the doorstep and waiting for their return – for all she’d insisted on helping them, he had insisted even more strongly that she not strain her hip any more than was necessary.
‘That’s a change,’ says Molly, with a wry smile just barely visible under the street lamps.
‘You’ve aged four years and two months in the last three and one. Obviously I’m going to be interested.’
‘Well,’ she says. ‘Do you remember when everyone was saying that it was the zombie apocalypse, last year?’
‘I read about it. A lot of cultish nonsense.’
‘And then a few days later, there were those brilliant northern lights.’
John looks up at the sky at the memory, and gets a snowflake in his eye for his pains. ‘Yeah, I remember that,’ he says.
‘Good.’ She turns on the stoop and bounces on her heels. ‘That might have been partially my fault.’
THE END
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I will eventually write the story that Molly mentions at the end. I just need to figure out the part in between the first two-thirds, and the very end.
