fic for phoenixfalls: Bee Yourself
Jun. 3rd, 2016 07:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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holmesticeTitle: Bee Yourself
Recipient:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
phoenixfalls
Author:gardnerhill
Characters/Pairings: Elementary; Sherlock Holmes & Joan Watson, Ms. Hudson
Rating: G
Warnings: Crack. Also, bees.
Summary: Things get Kafkaesque around the brownstone.
Word Count: 8345
Also on AO3: "Bee Yourself"
***
Considering how many stresses Joan Watson had been dealing with on a regular basis for the past few years, her transformation into a large bee one day wasn’t even the toughest thing she’d had to handle that week.
To be fair, she’d been having a very trying week.
Watson had been helping her partner with a series of unexplained disappearances of a multinational mineral company’s board; she’d also been studying a stack of his cold cases in her basement office in the evening. (To add insult to injury she had lost a favorite pair of boots when a murderer tried to run both of them over with a street-sweeper.)
This would have been enough on the plate for anyone else; yet she made room for more, because she was Joan Watson. Unfortunately this had resulted in an emotionally-draining set of family and friend interactions. She’d dined with her mother and Oren, and afterward had felt surer than ever that Mary Watson was beginning to show the onset symptoms of Alzheimer’s. She’d had lunch a day later with Captain Gregson, who was grimly terrified of the hellish ordeal his MS-afflicted lover had begun; she’d listened and suggested a few things but knew nothing would stop multiple sclerosis, nor would it ameliorate how bad things would get for Paige. She’d left both gatherings with heavier shoulders.
Two nights before, she’d had a long and grueling hunt for a shelter on a bitter night for a homeless middle-aged woman. Joan had talked in the park with the woman looking for information on one of her cases, and spent several icy hours finding a warm safe space for her as a thank-you. The woman had been almost embarrassingly grateful; she’d given Joan the most precious and private thing she owned (her real name, Luisa), and had called out “You are a queen – a queen!” that had echoed across the shelter and followed Joan out the door, red-cheeked and smiling.
Unfortunately that cold night had given her another and very unwanted gift. Next day she wasn’t smiling but gingerly sipping her mother’s tea blend, groaning in pain from her sore throat with each swallow. That had been Ms. Hudson’s housekeeping day and upon seeing Joan she’d immediately pressed some capsules on her – only a few vitamins and a little caloric boost, she’d said, but they would make her feel better. They’d worked, a little. Sherlock had considerately left her alone all evening as well; she’d huddled in her room until the combination of meds and vitamins and tea sent her into sleep.
Her work and worry had followed Joan into dreams where she chased Moriarty through a maze of buildings, up a fire escape and onto the roof of the brownstone where Jamie smirked at her and leaped off the ledge, soaring away as if hang-gliding; Joan was so angry at her that she jumped off the building herself and flapped her arms to fly after the mastermind.
Watson awoke mid-flight, and finished flying across the room before she realized what she was doing.
She threw out her hands and feet and feet to land on a vast curved piece of masonry and clung to it with her nails, which seemed to be on all … She held utterly still, and counted without looking at anything. …four, five, six hands and/or feet. And that wasn’t counting the muscles around her shoulders and the other two appendages there.
Yes, she had just flown across the room. A room that had grown enormously bigger, and looked like a slightly blurry pixelled picture… No. This was what things looked like through an insect’s compound eyes. And the room hadn’t gotten so much bigger, she had gotten …
The big curve of painted wood she clung to was, in fact, the window-frame. And she was digging into it just a little with three very sharp little nails on each hand/foot, in a vertical position like a 20something free-climber rubber-shoeing his way up a crack in Half Dome.
She looked back at the bed – having to turn her entire head to see the blurry-pixel image of that vast spread. The rumpled state showed that she’d slept in it, and was currently not dreaming. The head-turn also provided the info that she had a yellow furry back bearing translucent insect wings, four of them.
Another dream, of course. Joan reached a three-clawed forefoot to another of her legs and pinched. The sharp little nails scrabbled on the hard surface, and she felt no pain.
If she was dreaming that she was a bee, she had…
By ducking her head down to look between her three rows of legs, she saw the elegantly curved and wicked-looking stinger at the end of her abdomen. Smooth, not barbed – so she was a queen bee, the bee that could sting repeatedly, for combat with other queens. Of course she’d dream herself a queen bee.
Joan sat down, and her own stinger poked her thorax.
Pain like lightning shot through her and she leaped up again, shoulders quivering violently and a squeal escaping her. Her middle throbbed and ached at the site where she’d accidentally stung herself. And realized that she was hovering mid-air, her wings beating.
I’m not dreaming.
I’m a bee.
Dammit, I don’t have time for this! I have too much to do!
I need to inform Sherlock. After that –
No, no more thoughts until she’d notified her partner.
Sniff. Ah, Sherlock was downstairs, in the kitchen making coffee, he hadn’t showered yet, and he was eating some fruit-and-yoghurt combination over frozen waffles. (The sweet smell of the fruit made her stomach ache with hunger.)
Joan headed toward the doorway, and once again her shoulders knew how to quiver at just the right speed to beat the wings she bore. She flew through an Arc de Triomphe-sized doorway and downstairs at a speed like her usual brisk walk, toward the kitchen and the enticing smell of Sherlock’s breakfast (and the less enticing smell of Sherlock himself). She had to make herself stop well-short of the glistening, beautifully-colored fruit topping because everything inside her said Eat, Eat, Eat; she alit onto the table, neat as a veteran pilot’s touchdown.
Sherlock – also that slightly-blurred pixel look to him, but she smelled the change in his chemistry when he saw her. Surprise, worry. “What are you doing out, Your Majesty?” he murmured.
So she was indeed a queen bee. And she’d heard that perfectly, from ears that felt like they were on top of her head and moved about like swiveling fingers… of course, her antennae. “Sherlock, it’s me!” she shouted, and even just listening to herself heard how little her current voice carried – at this register more of a high whine than a voice. There was no sign on his face that he’d heard nor understood her.
At the approach of his cupped hand she leaped up and away out of his reach. If he thought she was a bee who’d gotten free of the roof hives he’d put her in there, and if he did that Joan would either be killed by the queen already in there, or she’d have to kill the queen to save herself; she knew that much about bees. She had to communicate with him.
She flew to his open laptop, currently showing a news webpage about the disappearing board members. The letters on the keys were a little blurred but she could recognize them. She landed on the keyboard (the keys like broad flat tiles that did not move when she dropped onto them, giving her an idea about her current weight). She tried tapping hard on the J and the W, but they wouldn’t move no matter how she pushed. No leverage, no weight behind her to move the keys. Well, that explained why she could fly and had no trouble clinging to the vertical window-sill, but right now this was a problem.
Sherlock approached her holding a jar. Not the hive, it would be deadly to her even if the queen and most of the other bees would be dormant in the winter cold –
Cold. It had been cold last night.
Up and out to the living area. The fireplace was cold, the wood from last night charred or ashes. She landed on the gritty charcoal and scraped at it with all of her hand–feet. To the wall, just out of Sherlock’s reach; land, and walk downward, turning right in a curve. Back to the fireplace.
***
Sherlock halted in the middle of the room, jar still in his hand, and watched the peculiar movements as the escaped queen bee smudged the wall in a long wobbly crook, and flew to the fireplace. Then it flew back to the same spot in the wall, walking in a circle. Away. Back. Up, down, across.
“Stop,” he said, and the bee stopped halfway through its zigzag; the insect obeying his vocal command was an eloquent clue all by itself. He stared at the charcoal tracks the bee had walked on the wall.
J O Δ И.
“WATSON!” Sherlock shouted up toward her room.
***
He knew. He already knew. She could see it in his eyes when he looked at her again, after getting no response from the room upstairs.
“If you can understand me,” he said to her, eyes full of realization and wide with fear, “then please wait right where you are whilst I confirm what I believe you wish to communicate.”
Joan relaxed a little, her wings folding along her back, as Sherlock ran up the stairs and into her room. Her stomach ached with hunger. The fruit on the table smelled so good, so good, just a quick trip over to the table for a taste wouldn’t … She dug in her sharp nails, and waited.
The wait seemed forever. All six of her legs trembled. Her sore throat had kept her drinking tea instead of eating the day before, and now she was so hungry. So hungry.
He came down at last, almost running down the stairs; he smelt of fear, and the incredulous look in his eyes had only brightened. He stood before her wall, with his right hand open and fingers spread. “If you are Joan Watson,” he said in a voice almost level and flat as his conversational tone, “then please fly over here and land on my thumb.”
Watson was already calming down as she buzzed over to stand on the broad ball of her partner’s thumb; the warmth from his skin eddied up to her underbelly. She felt his whole body exhale in relief as well.
“Let’s get you fed first, Watson,” he said.
***
The fruit’s juices on the waffle were thin, watery-tasting; she’d only taken a few gulps when Sherlock pushed over a saucer with a pool of honey on it. Honey – she fell on that like a dog on a steak and all but buried her face in the gorgeous stuff. What a difference; sweet, rich, thick, fragrant, filling, food and drink both. She felt her shoulders warm, her belly stop aching, her legs go still from their agitated quiver. Her tongue was shaped like a three-petaled flower – proboscis, Sherlock would correct her if she’d said it aloud – perfect for scooping up big gobs of the liquid gold.
Sherlock watched her eat without trying to talk to her again. There was relief on his face as well as fear and wonder. Of course, her being missing from her room could have made him as terrified as the time she’d been captured by Mycroft’s French business associates. She’d seen that same fear and relief when they were once again face to face. And now it was the same mix of feelings. Yes, she was safe and yes, she was not in pain. No, she wasn’t all right, she was a goddamn bee. No, she couldn’t seem to talk about it at the moment. Yes, she wanted some sort of rational explanation.
Only after she finished gobbling the sweet sticky feast before her (and automatically running her bristly forearms/forelegs over her face to comb it clean) did she look up at her partner.
A great dark wall descended onto the table, and she leaped up to fly back…and hovered, as the monolithic toppling wall turned out to be a phone Sherlock set flat on the table. He tapped a few app buttons and moved an indicator all the way to one end and sat back. “Watson, first we must establish communication. If you would step onto the phone I can test the microphone’s strength and your own ability to use it.”
Aha. Down again, her hands/feet lightly dug into the phone surface, and walked across the shiny warm surface to the bottom microphone. As loud as she could. “Sherlock, can you hear me?” She jerked her head up at hearing her voice in the room – at a higher pitch, as if she’d been huffing helium, but intelligible nonetheless.
“Yes!” The relief on her partner’s face mirrored what she herself felt. Hurdle one crossed.
A beat later, “What happened?” they asked simultaneously.
***
Sherlock typed up theories on his laptop, with Joan providing input from her perch on the phone. They wound up with a list postulating everything from the homeless woman being a sorceress in disguise who turned Joan into a queen when she called her one (“We’re not in Harry Potter,” Joan said in exasperation at Sherlock’s postulation; “I was speculating more on the monkey’s-paw law of unintended consequences,” he retorted) to someone wealthy and with a grudge against them hiring geneticists to tamper with their DNA in revenge for their imprisoning a CEO or twelve.
One item stood out from that list, first and foremost, and they both saw it. Sherlock took up his regular phone. “Ms. Hudson? Please come to the brownstone at your earliest convenience. And bring the supplements you shared with Watson when you come over – ones I strongly suspect contain some extract of royal jelly. …Yes, you might say Watson had a reaction to them last night.” He cut the connection and caught his lower lip in his teeth. “Suppose I ought to call Detective Bell with our regrets.”
Joan examined one of her hairy forelegs. “I can’t see us joining him today, no.”
***
Marthe Hudson covered her mouth with both hands when Sherlock introduced her to Joan in her current state. “Oh, my god. Joanie, are you okay?”
“Other than being a bee, you mean?” Joan kept her pixelled focus on the microphone. Ms. Hudson smelled of a flowery perfume that Joan wanted to lick from her skin, even though she knew intellectually that the scent wasn’t coming from flowers. “I’m fine.”
“Ms. Hudson, for how long have you been taking these supplements?” Sherlock leaned back in his chair, fingers steepled and touching his nose, eyes level.
“A while. Months. They’ve done wonders for my energy levels and my health.”
Joan leaned over the mic. “If it’s any consolation, Marthe? My sore throat’s gone.”
She huffed out a little laugh. “Well, that’s something, I guess.”
Sherlock pursed his lips. “I find it hard to credit that this – reaction – is listed under possible side-effects.”
“I’ll double-check the bottle.” Hudson took it up and reached in her purse for her reading glasses.
The writing on the bottle was in Greek – “I order them from a supplier in Mykonos” – and royal jelly was indeed the main component of the supplements. Marthe had also brought a printout of the order information, also in Greek, with the website listed at the bottom.
Joan learned a lot more about Greek bees and honey-manufacture in the next few minutes than she’d planned to that day. “Pevko – that’s honey made from pine,” Ms. Hudson elucidated when Sherlock looked at the website, sounding out the word in the advertisement for the supplement; Joan stood on the numbers row of the keyboard trying to read the blurry pixels as best she could. “The wax and royal jelly sold also originate from the same source. Ah, here, I’ve found the disclaimers.” Ms. Hudson adjusted her reading glasses. “’Μπορούν να γίνουν υπνηλία,’ ‘may become sleepy,’ that’s drowsiness as a possible symptom. ‘Δεν λαμβάνουν ασπιρίνη,’ ‘do not take aspirin’ – you didn’t mix it with aspirin, did you, Joanie?”
Joan looked down at her furry thorax and her antennae curled like a two-fingered fist. She flew to the phone. “No,” was all she said.
“All right. Well, I didn’t think that was the problem, but you can’t dismiss everyth–” A long pause. “…Oh.”
That was an eloquent syllable. Joan looked up.
“Elucidate.” Sherlock’s voice was dead still – the level voice he got when he was furious.
Ms. Hudson held up Sherlock’s lens to the bottom of the bottle. “It’s … very small, at the very end of the disclaimer, in what looks like half-point type.” She peered through her reading glasses through the lens at the thin grey line on the bottle. ’Μπορεί να γίνει μια μέλισσα.’“ Ms. Hudson exhaled, bit her lip. “’You may become a honeybee.’”
Silence. Joan’s wings buzzed once.
“Well.” Sherlock stared at the webpage. “I stand corrected.”
***
Marthe Hudson’s command voice was an impressive thing to behold as she paced up and down in the kitchen, living room, and up and down the stairs for nearly 3 hours, snapping Greek into the phone.
Holmes and Watson were not idle in those three hours. Sherlock made lunch for everyone – a large salad for the two humans, and a cap of water to go with the honey-dollop for Watson. Afterward both experimented with which fonts and print sizes on the laptop were the most readable for Joan, who provided feedback via the phone-mic resting on one side of the keyboard, in a process not unlike going to an optometrist to test glasses. By changing fonts, and then point sizes, they discovered that Watson’s bee-eyes could best read OCR-style font, no smaller than 12 points, and after Sherlock had altered the webpage Joan was able to read a police report (on Mr. Sanna, one of the missing CEOs). She was so relieved to be able to read again that she went right back into work-mode and was soon so absorbed in study she almost forgot her current state…until she automatically reached for the mouse to change websites and only dragged one hairy foreleg against the number-key on which she was sitting. However, beating her wings produced a buzz which got Sherlock’s instant attention, and her landing on the mouse and returning to her key transmitted the idea. From then on Joan only needed to buzz her wings once to get a forward-click, and a double buzz (aided by her doing a 180 on the key) for a back-click.
After three reports, Sherlock shook his head. “Watson, we can either work out a pantomime when you are away from the phone, or we can see if you can speak directly into my ear.”
Joan nodded – that she could do, though the only way she could shake her head was side to side. She flew to Sherlock’s shoulder and climbed up to his ear; it was a huge dank cavern lined with bristly hair like an oversized medical model, and she had to refrain from reciting all the parts (pinna, whorl, outer ear, middle ear…). He twitched at the feel of her bee-feet and she could only imagine how they tickled. “Sorry,” she said automatically.
“I heard something.” His voice echoed back to her. “Was that your voice? Try speaking to me again.”
She faced into the odiferous cave, using the same volume as on the phone mic. “Sherlock, can you hear me?”
“Yes, Watson, I can hear you – but faintly, as if far away as well as high-pitched. Can you make your voice a little louder?”
Louder, but lower. She dropped her register, as if auditioning for the bass part of a quartet, or a foghorn, and slowed her words. “How. Is. This?”
“Yes! ‘How is this?’.”
Relief filled her. She could feel his muscles relax too, even from her perch on his warm ear. “You. Can. Hear. Me?”
“It’s higher than your regular voice, but I can hear you.”
“I think I’m getting somewhere!” It was the first thing Marthe had said in English for three hours.
Sherlock was at her side in seconds; Joan still clung to his ear.
“The sales rep sent me to the chemist,” Ms. Hudson said absently, while some dreadful tinny Muzak eddied from the phone in her hand. “Chemist got me his boss, who contacted the shipper and then the distributor. That went to the company’s administrative staff and then to the office manager, and then the CEO’s secretary. Then the CEO.”
“You’ve got the CEO?” Sherlock said.
“No, Ms. Stavros is away on a company retreat right now – but they’ve sent me to her in-house laboratory. I’m waiting to hear from her personal chemist.”
The Muzak stopped.
“Ah. Χαίρετε,” Ms. Hudson greeted the person on the other end of the line, and launched into the same spiel Joan had practically memorized despite knowing no Greek. Supplements. Side effects. Friend of mine. Half-point type.
They were close enough to hear both sides of the discussion. Sherlock translated.
“The chemist – a Mr. Gekas – says they’ve been having some bee die-offs from pesticide use.” He glared at the phone in Ms. Hudson’s hand. Joan patted her partner’s earlobe; Sherlock always took bee deaths personally and for both of them it had just gotten very personal indeed. “So they developed a new fertilizer being used on adjoining fields, created for the purpose of counteracting the neonicotinoids. The bees are doing better. However, Watson, yours is not the first nor only complaint about this particular side-effect of the change – four others as well.”
Four bee-people besides herself. And not a chance of getting their contact information, if this company’s legal department would have a say in the matter.
More Greek from both ends. Sherlock’s smirk was evident in his tone. “Mr. Gekas says his lab is working on negating this particular side-effect.”
“You think?” Joan snapped. Five suits from furious bees with human lawyers would be extraordinarily unforgettable publicity for this company.
Ms Hudson lowered the phone, and everything on her sagged; she looked as tired as Joan felt. “He wouldn’t give me any contact info for the other affected people; probably from their legal department. They’ve issued a recall, finally.”
“Any good news?” Joan snapped into Sherlock’s ear, who was already saying much the same thing in much the same tone.
Ms Hudson tucked a stray whisp of hair back. “Yes. Milos says the effect is temporary.”
Oh thank God.
“How long?” Joan and Sherlock said simultaneously.
Their housekeeper set the phone down. “Well, the four they know about have returned to normal. They all changed back to people after five to ten days, depending on how many of the tablets they took.”
“For two tablets?” Sherlock repeated Joan’s dictation.
“Ten days.”
Sherlock winced at the Mandarin expletive squeaked into his ear.
“Joanie?” Marthe’s face was crumpled with sympathy, one hand reaching out.
“It’s fine,” Watson said. “It’s fine. I’m fine.” Ten days! But we’re in the middle of a case, and I’ve got to talk to Mom, and keep in touch with the Yuns, and get back with Captain Gregson and Paige, and Alfredo’s expecting me tomorrow night for another break-in tutorial, and I’ve got these books to read, and the shelters to visit, and Emily, and …
“Milos?” The interrogative rumble from Sherlock distracted Watson away from her self-pity; she practically felt the eyebrow quirk that always accompanied that tone.
Their housekeeper ducked her head a tiny bit, her cheeks pinker. “Oh. Well, he sketches a bit in his spare time, apparently. He’s emailing me copies of his work. Wants me to know what I think.”
“You were … chatting with him.”
Joan recognized that tone, and threw a command voice into her new register. “Sherlock, I am a queen bee now, which means I can sting repeatedly without endangering myself. If you say one mean thing to her I’ll give you my first one.”
Stillness. “Well done, Ms. Hudson. Your connection to your new friend may prove useful to us as well.”
“Exactly,” Joan bawled into Sherlock’s ear, exasperated. Marthe’s attraction to artistic men – and their enthrallment with her – practically qualified as a super-power.
After repeated reassurances that she’d performed above and beyond in making reparations for her unwitting cause of this, the brownstone residents saw the worried Ms. Hudson off at the door, Watson still clinging to Sherlock’s ear.
When the door closed, Joan dropped her head a moment, her antennae curled forward. She just wanted to wake up from this dream already, and be human and take a shower and put on clothes and not be small enough to get stepped on – which was apparently too much to ask these days.
Ten days. The earlobe under her feet was warm. She was so tired…
Sherlock went back to his laptop, and only when he was seated at his desk did he register that though the little tickly feet still clung to his ear he hadn’t felt any movement nor heard speech for a minute or so. “Watson?”
A tiny, high-pitched version of Joan Watson's snore was the only response.
Lips pursed in amusement, Sherlock settled in to read the reports looking for links. Perhaps this time he would avoid waking her.
***
Joan awoke, relieved that her dream of being a bee… She counted her appendages – four, five, six – and her wings drooped a little.
“Your supper is on the table, Watson. Ms. Hudson was considerate enough to buy it and drop it off.”
Puzzled, she headed over to the kitchen, and saw four little jars of honey lined up, all opened, and with a blob of the honey from each on the inside of its corresponding lid before the jars. Orange blossom; blackberry blossom; wildflower; elderflower. She’d left Joan a bee buffet to try out.
The novelty of playing honey connoisseur occupied her as much as the business of eating, and she was in a much better mood when she returned to her partner’s shoulder to read the screen. The fourth name made it click, and she flew down to her mic. “Mr. Agnos. Sherlock, you see the pattern in the executives’ surnames.”
“A multinational corporation. And yet every disappearance is someone with a Greek surname. Indeed. Coincidence, I’m quite sure.” Of course his expression said no such thing.
“I think Mr. Gekas didn’t know about all the people affected by the supplement. I’ll bet those four he knew were self-reported, or had family who contacted them the way you and Marthe got him.”
“But if someone knew about the effect of the supplement…” Sherlock stroked his chin. “This would be a way to remove board members besides kidnapping or murder.”
“Deliberately transformed into bees?” Joan indicated her own corpus with a wave of one foreleg.
His eyebrow quirked. “Are you quite sure we’re not in Harry Potter?”
Joan ignored that, caught up in the theory. “Side-effect of one pill is five days as a bee. But how long have they been missing? And what if it wasn’t a dosage accident, but a deliberate poisoning? How many pills would it take to keep them bees long enough…”
Sherlock went still. “Assuming fertile women and men transformed into their bee counterparts, that would mean queens and drones. A drone’s life is 90 days long. Eighteen pills would be a death sentence for a man. But if all the women become queens as you did, they’d merely be trapped for weeks without endangering their lives – a queen can live for 5 years.”
“The corporation has an NYC headquarters. I could head over there to do some spy–”
“Out of the question.” Sherlock’s response was so swift and adamant that Joan’s finger-ears flattened against her head. His eyes were black and unreflective. “You are not going outside until you are no longer a bee.”
Joan felt her temper, strong and icy, rise up. She crouched over the mike and glared back at Sherlock (with all five eyes). “Excuse me? Was that an order from you, Sherlock?” She made herself sound as stern and commanding as possible even as her voice came out in Alvin the Chipmunk’s register. “I may look like a bug right now, partner, but the last time I checked I was an adult. You’re not my father to ground me for wearing a strapless dress.”
“No, but I am an apiarist who’s been watching bee deaths escalate from toxins in the world outside,” he snapped.
“So I take my meals here and try to minimize breathing in car exhaust!”
He gestured wildly at a window. “That is hardly the beginning and end of the dangers a solitary insect faces in the world beyond that window! A short list of bee predators that dwell within 50 feet of this building include skunks, opossums, pigeons, rats, other bees, and Clyde.”
Joan’s head swiveled in the direction of the aquarium where the tortoise had dozed through the entire dramatic day. The thought of being eaten by their pet, even as an accident, felt like betrayal. “So I’m relatively safer here as long as I don’t go into Clyde’s tank. But what if I stayed with you, when we were outside?”
His angry shout was laced with fear. “It’s dangerous outside for you right now!”
“As opposed to how safe it is for me as a small woman in New York City? One who’s now known to associate with you and/or Mycroft?”
That stilled him. Twice, now, she had been in the grip of murderous people only because of her attachment to the Holmes brothers, without benefit of metamorphosis.
She continued, angry and low. “We are partners, Sherlock. We’re better together, and you know it. I still have a brain, and now I have a stinger.” The more Joan thought about the idea the more she liked it. “Think of how we talked to Ms. Hudson at the phone today. I stay on your ear like a Bluetooth, or hang on to your hair near your ear, so we can keep in touch. I might not be able to drive a car, but there’s got to be some advantage to having a small overlooked associate who can fly.”
He blinked at that.
“Or I could spend ten days flying in circles here and going nuts from not doing anything – right when my current condition is an actual lead for our case.”
And she knew she’d won when he said, after a very long glazed-eye silence, “Exactly how many friends and family members do you plan to bring into our confidence on this?”
“We lie. Say I got the flu, which would keep me here for a couple of weeks.”
Sherlock smiled.
And Joan was astonished at how her entire body relaxed at the thought of postponing all her regular socialization and concentrating solely on their work.
Holmes stood. “In that case, Watson, we have a call to pay on KafCorp’s NY branch. Yeesh.” This last said with a tiny shudder as Watson flew over and again crawled on his ear with her tickly little bee-feet.
“Suck it up, partner.”
***
In a mid-level office with a park view Sherlock greeted and spoke to several of the executives; Mr. Jacowicz, Mr. Gilchrist, Ms. Basarnian, Mr. Salo. They were aware of the disappearances of their European compatriots, but had put it down to the unfortunate civil problems going on in Greece. They gave him some files on the missing people.
During the talk Watson stayed hidden in Sherlock’s hair, surrounded by the odours inherent in her surroundings. Nothing smelled like heroin, it had finally left even its imprint on his hair smell, and she was pleased at that. But another, familiar scent tickled her receptors, even beyond the unpleasant cigarette-breath from several of the executives. She swiveled her head, curled her antennae. The same smell as –
“Sherlock, I smell the same supplement here. The exact same. I’ll be right back,” she called in his ear, and dropped down to the back of his chair before flying away. Sherlock made a half-exclamation and half-turned but stopped himself not to draw attention.
Stay high, out of swatting range, swoop past the buzz-saw-shaped sprinkler heads, down the corridor and up to the closed door with the combination-lock. She dropped to the ground and crawled under the door like she was playing army with Oren, squeezing between the top of the door and the rough flat-pile office carpet.
The light was off and the room had no window. She couldn’t see anything, but the smell of royal-jelly tablets was overwhelming. Bottles of them here. Hundreds of pills, enough to turn lots of people into bees and keep them that way for weeks. These people knew what they were doing.
She squeezed back out and flew straight into the face of a woman heading for the toilet next to that door.
Both yelled and Joan headed for the ceiling at Mach 10 just ahead of the woman’s swinging hand. She sat on the round metal sprinkler head gasping for breath and fanning her wings to cool herself down while the human woman below did the same (“Kishaar, you okay?” “A bug, a, a big bee, in my face. I’m okay”). So much for stealth.
She waited until both women retreated into the bathroom before heading back, hearing anxiety in Sherlock’s suave tone as he deduced various people’s histories (stalling for her, how sweet). “Ah, thank you very much, I must be going,” he said at the smack of a big bug landing on the back of his head, and exited the offices.
As Watson expected, Holmes’ anger at Joan’s recklessness was instantly assuaged when she climbed to his ear and made her report. “Short version,” she concluded as the elevator began its descent. “They know. I think someone discovered what these pills do, bought out the toxic run, and the board is currently staging a bloodless coup with them. They may have had one of their people in Greece put the pills in their co-chairs’ food or beverage as a test, in a place where disappearances of business executives would be lost in the general austerity breakdown.”
“That would also explain why so few transfigurations have been reported. They got most of them out of circulation.”
“So, we know about the stash, and I don’t think we tipped them off.”
The cold pit hit her at the same time she saw the look on Sherlock’s. “Until I flew into that woman’s face.”
The same note in his voice even as he pulled out his phone. “They are the very last office that would be blasé about large insects in their presence. Yes, Detective Bell!”
***
The warrant got them into KafCorp NYC’s locked windowless stash room within the hour – and it was still half-full of the toxic pills employees had been destroying when the NYPD came in. But even as the cuffs came out, they saw that most of the faces from Sherlock’s visit there earlier were gone. Sherlock cursed and Joan followed suit. The opened bottle on the desk told her what had happened to them.
So did the smell of her approaching attackers.
Four enormous bees swooped at the humans, buzzing furiously. No; three flew at Sherlock, and one flew directly at Watson. A bee as big as her, smelling of anger, flexing an unbarbed stinger meant for mortal combat. Another queen.
Det. Bell yelled at the sight of the bees in the room; some cops cursed and ducked down with their handcuffed charges. Sherlock stood stock-still, a man unafraid of dealing with such creatures and a few stings.
The board members. Three men, one woman. A queen, and three –
“Drones!” she yelled in Sherlock’s ear and leaped into the air. The queen – Ms. Basarnian – veered after her.
She fled down the hall, diving and swooping to break up the flight pattern and keep her pursuer from anticipating her moves. It added distance to the flight but it was a risk she was willing to take. Amusing to see the humans, police and executives alike, cursing and ducking to avoid the two queens.
In a hive there can be only one queen; any rival is challenged to mortal combat (the reason for the queen’s barbless stinger, to be used multiple times against other queens). But this wasn’t the queen-bee instinct to sting a rival to death; this was plain old human-criminal killing of their witnesses.
If Watson stood her ground and locked stingers with Ms. Basarnian, she’d either die or deliberately kill another human being for the first time in her life (temporary bees though they were). She could take the Life of Brian approach to gladiatorial combat and simply see how long she could outrun her opponent. But there was also a third way…
Watson dropped straight down a stack of files and shot across the storage room millimeters from the carpet like a pelican skimming the ocean surface. Basarnian followed, uttering a shout that was just a plain old expletive.
Catch me if you can. I jog every morning, and you smoke. What kind of stamina can you have?
Joan swooped up and bore straight for her partner. He stood, braced and bright-eyed, a charcoal-grey container in one hand, and his other hand open and facing up. Clever, that’s how he’d tell them apart... She landed neatly on the ball of his thumb as she’d done in the brownstone. He nodded curtly once, and flicked her to the side just as Basarnian caught up. Watson landed on the desk, and Basarnian’s descent was engulfed in charcoal-grey and borne to the surface. The upside-down coffee mug bearing the KafCorp logo muffled the executive’s buzzing and high-pitched profanity. Other overturned containers – a pencil-holder, a small trophy from a kid’s soccer game, and another coffee mug – buzzed in the same muffled way.
A log-sized forefinger was extended, crooked away from her. Only then did Watson feel how exhausted she was; her belly felt pinched with ravening hunger once again. She waddled across the table to climb onto her partner’s finger for a return to his ear.
“Drones,” Sherlock said to the other police, who stared at the crazy guy who caught bees in his bare hands. “Male bees have no stingers. We were all perfectly safe. For the most part. And yes, they’re a vital clue to the scheme that’s been unfolding, which is why we need to keep them alive.” And her warning meant he knew he wouldn’t be stung, catching the other three.
“Sherlock, looks like you missed one.” Marcus Bell reached out his hand to gather Joan.
“Thank you, Detective Bell, I have her.” Holmes reached up smoothly to encase Watson in his own warm hand. “Excellent observational skills.”
Bell shook his head. “This was a weird one. I’m sorry Joan missed out on it. She’s got the flu? I may have to bring some soup over later.”
“Possibly in another week, Detective. In the meantime, I’ll take care of these bees.”
Once Bell was back to helping round up the human executives, Sherlock set Joan back on her pinna perch and took out some evidence bags, using a mechanical pencil to poke a few tiny air-holes in each one. “I have a spare glassed-in bee-frame that will make an ideal prison for these four until they change back. In the meantime, Watson, I have a feeling that all five of you need to eat.”
“Yes,” Joan bellowed.
***
The four incarcerated bees refused to talk to Joan, though they clearly could speak – “Not without my lawyer” – and lapped up honey when released into the glassed bee-frame; they remained in Sherlock’s room to protect them from the elements. But the sobering sight of two of the four dead the next day, curled on the bottom of the bee-frame – one of them the queen – sent chills down both. Sherlock carefully extracted the two corpses and examined them. “Nicotine residue in their lungs from the smoking they did as people just before they took the pills. Neonicotinoids are fatal to bees. A pity they chose to avoid incarceration by inadvertently sentencing themselves to death.”
The remaining two drones – Messrs. Jacowicz and Salo – did not cause any trouble, but they wouldn’t talk either, except to answer “One” when Joan asked them how many pills they’d each taken. Their interrogations about the disappearances of the Greek executives would wait until they regained human form. (Which they did, five days later – to find that Sherlock had moved the frame into the basement panic-room, precluding their escape; Bell took the cuffed men into custody. Ms. Hudson’s tear-eyed announcement that Miklos had cut off communication with her without warning let them know who was the likely contact that had notified KafCorp about the supplements and who’d gone into hiding himself.)
The rest of the whole bizarre situation was anticlimactic.
Sherlock began setting a bit of tea in a teaspoon next to his partner’s morning blob of honey, and breakfast became a civilized meal once again. After breakfast, usually at her encouragement, Sherlock went outside for a jog around the park, both to stay active and to give Watson some outside fresh air and flying exercise as she paced him. (“That’s the one thing that’s a bit disappointing in all this,” she confided at her partner’s query. “Flying just feels like walking for me, there’s nothing special about it.”)
In the afternoon Watson read her cold-case files (with an obliging Sherlock or Ms. Hudson turning pages for her). Writing was a puzzle – the charcoal was too messy – until Ms. Hudson fashioned bee-sized Roman writing-tablets for her from sections of a wooden paint-stirrer covered with a thin layer of wax on which Joan could scratch her notes with her clawed bee-feet. “Your writing is so tiny and so perfect,” Marthe marveled, bent over to see the marks. “There’s a market for dollhouse miniatures. If you ever want to go in for calligraphy…”
Joan took her evening honey-dab just before the sun went down, and was asleep 15 minutes later, curled near the radiator in her room for warmth.
Joan’s wings might not make a difference, but her stinger did the one and only time she used it – the day a hitman sent by an aggrieved and wealthy felon thought he had Holmes alone in an alley and got a stab in the precise cluster of nerves on his neck to make him scream and drop the gun, and then get dropped by Sherlock’s baton. “Not a word, Watson,” Holmes warned his smug partner as he cuffed his assailant. “Not one ‘I told you so.’” “Moi?” Watson responded.
Hours became days, became a week, became more. Aside from one semi-perilous incident when she tried to talk to Clyde in his tank and was snapped at instead (and then snapped at by a frightened Sherlock), she remained safe.
A schedule of uninterrupted sleep, regular meals, mentally-challenging work, and healthy physical activity is good for everyone – but especially good for people who’ve been overdoing the work element at the expense of many of the others. Watson slept deeply and ate well and stayed mentally and physically active; she felt well-rested and at peace in her enforced quarantine from her outside contacts, comfortable in her 250-milligram corpus. One set of Ms. Hudson’s wax slates was reserved for her diary, as she took notes on the patient’s progress.
And one morning in the second week she awoke and stretched her wings and there was nothing to stretch. The radiator was too hot on her back, all the long bare-skinned length of her back, and the wooden floor felt hard where her solid heavy weight pressed. Again she stretched, and counted. One, two, three…four. She blinked. Two eyes, two binocular, clear-focused eyes. Hair, only atop her head and longer than her bee-fuzz. Ears that didn’t move. A tongue that wasn’t shaped like a flower. She sat up – on an actual pair of bipedal buttocks with no stinger in the way.
She dragged herself, staggering, to her two bare feet, and spent a few minutes lurching around the room and getting used to being five foot something and vertical in a suddenly-smaller room, instead of four centimeters and horizontal. She sniffed the air and smelled tea but nothing else; after her bee-senses her nose almost felt blocked.
Only one thing she absolutely needed to do now, before anything else… She stumbled into the shower and didn’t come out for an hour.
Sherlock didn’t even look up from his laptop and tea at the kitchen table, but the ear-to-ear grin spoke enough for him, as did the jovial tone. “Watson. I thought I heard the dulcet sound of your feet stomping down the stairs. Breakfast?”
“I want four eggs, half a pound of bacon, a couple of bagels with cream cheese, a bowl of soup with dumplings, and anything else that bees don’t eat. My god, I can say all that without roaring in basso profundo.” Watson poured a mug of tea and downed half of it on her way to the fridge.
He watched her pull out refrigerator contents and start the heat under an omelet pan. “You ought to get a full medical check-up as a precaution–”
“Can’t talk. Eating.”
Sherlock returned to his tea and research while his partner threw together and began to devour a meal not far off the wish-list she’d rattled off.
He heard her swallow, and then take a deep breath – the kind of inhalation one makes after a prodigious meal eaten too quickly for proper respiration. “I need to call Marthe, she’ll be relieved. I’ll let Marcus know I’m better, but I’m taking one more day to make sure I’m not contagious. We’ll eventually need to talk to our former drones and find who else was in on the plot. I assume the rest of their pills are in Evidence.”
“Correct.” Sherlock closed his laptop and pushed it away.
Joan nodded. “I can still do stuff from here today. I’ve got to call Oren and Mom; I’ve been out of the loop. I have to get used to walking instead of flying, and I’d better not drive for a few days, either, my eyes are still adjusting. And I’ve got to transcribe my notes; I’ll need your microscope. The rest can wait a day or two.” She stretched, waving her shoulders and making a face. “Feels like something’s missing.”
“Well, now that you’re in no danger of being eaten by our tortoise or stabbed to death by another insect, my own schedule can resume as well.” Sherlock tapped his closed laptop. “I’ve emailed Randy to let him know I’ll join him at a support group in two hours.”
Everyone was back to normal, it seemed.
***
There were changes, though.
That first afternoon back, while transcribing her bee-notes from the KafCorp case and her makeshift journal, she began to feel tired; instead of making tea and soldiering through Watson immediately turned everything off and headed to her room for a nap. When she awoke she called her counselor Helen to resume her appointments, and also contacted Emily.
Over the days following her return, Watson resumed her social contacts at New York speed – the station, her mother and brother, her half-sister’s family, Captain Gregson, the shelters, her training sessions with Alfredo. One day was wholly taken up in her visiting two graves, one marking the end of her medical career and the other a casualty of her current one; she said nothing on her return and her eyes were red, and Sherlock said nothing either.
The partners listened to Jacowicz and Salo’s questioning sessions about their hoarding a non-FDA-regulated drug associated with several disappearances including those of their two colleagues. (Oddly, their “amnesia” cleared right up when Joan let them both know that they were not the only former bees in the room.)
“Your temporary life as an Apis genus seems to have made you even more busy,” her partner remarked one warm spring evening when he found her on the roof, ostensibly poring over a cold-case file.
“Mm?” Joan didn’t look away from the hive she’d been studying for an hour. “I don’t feel busier. If anything, it’s like I’ve slowed down.” She did feel slowed down; more relaxed and calm, more sure of her work and her place here, less stressed from her duties. Yet she was back to her breakneck schedule from before Ms. Hudson’s pills.
Except…that she now ensured that obligations were spaced out, rarely more than one or two a day, and regularly interspersed with self-care – sessions with her counselor, a lunch-date with Emily, practicing her Mandarin with Mrs. Yun. Staring at Sherlock’s bees and wondering if she could have befriended the Watsonia queen in her former state.
“I fear you’d have had the same success as you did with Clyde.” Sherlock handed her a mug. “Animals must follow their natures, Watson.” Chamomile, good for winding down to sleep.
Joan accepted the tea. She didn’t need Sherlock’s gifts to understand how he’d followed her train of thought. “It’s clearly my nature to work. But I needed to take care of myself better, and I’ve been doing a lot more of that lately. Funny how fast that becomes a priority when a missed meal means you’ll starve, or if you get too tired you’ll fall down dead.”
Sherlock sat beside her. “I believe the cliché is ‘stop to smell the roses.’ Which is an apt description of a bee’s life.”
“And it wasn’t a bad one. It might even have taught me a valuable lesson about pacing myself.” Joan smiled at the steadily frantic insects. “But I’ll stick to aspirin next time I get sick.”
Recipient:
phoenixfallsAuthor:
gardnerhillCharacters/Pairings: Elementary; Sherlock Holmes & Joan Watson, Ms. Hudson
Rating: G
Warnings: Crack. Also, bees.
Summary: Things get Kafkaesque around the brownstone.
Word Count: 8345
Also on AO3: "Bee Yourself"
***
Considering how many stresses Joan Watson had been dealing with on a regular basis for the past few years, her transformation into a large bee one day wasn’t even the toughest thing she’d had to handle that week.
To be fair, she’d been having a very trying week.
Watson had been helping her partner with a series of unexplained disappearances of a multinational mineral company’s board; she’d also been studying a stack of his cold cases in her basement office in the evening. (To add insult to injury she had lost a favorite pair of boots when a murderer tried to run both of them over with a street-sweeper.)
This would have been enough on the plate for anyone else; yet she made room for more, because she was Joan Watson. Unfortunately this had resulted in an emotionally-draining set of family and friend interactions. She’d dined with her mother and Oren, and afterward had felt surer than ever that Mary Watson was beginning to show the onset symptoms of Alzheimer’s. She’d had lunch a day later with Captain Gregson, who was grimly terrified of the hellish ordeal his MS-afflicted lover had begun; she’d listened and suggested a few things but knew nothing would stop multiple sclerosis, nor would it ameliorate how bad things would get for Paige. She’d left both gatherings with heavier shoulders.
Two nights before, she’d had a long and grueling hunt for a shelter on a bitter night for a homeless middle-aged woman. Joan had talked in the park with the woman looking for information on one of her cases, and spent several icy hours finding a warm safe space for her as a thank-you. The woman had been almost embarrassingly grateful; she’d given Joan the most precious and private thing she owned (her real name, Luisa), and had called out “You are a queen – a queen!” that had echoed across the shelter and followed Joan out the door, red-cheeked and smiling.
Unfortunately that cold night had given her another and very unwanted gift. Next day she wasn’t smiling but gingerly sipping her mother’s tea blend, groaning in pain from her sore throat with each swallow. That had been Ms. Hudson’s housekeeping day and upon seeing Joan she’d immediately pressed some capsules on her – only a few vitamins and a little caloric boost, she’d said, but they would make her feel better. They’d worked, a little. Sherlock had considerately left her alone all evening as well; she’d huddled in her room until the combination of meds and vitamins and tea sent her into sleep.
Her work and worry had followed Joan into dreams where she chased Moriarty through a maze of buildings, up a fire escape and onto the roof of the brownstone where Jamie smirked at her and leaped off the ledge, soaring away as if hang-gliding; Joan was so angry at her that she jumped off the building herself and flapped her arms to fly after the mastermind.
Watson awoke mid-flight, and finished flying across the room before she realized what she was doing.
She threw out her hands and feet and feet to land on a vast curved piece of masonry and clung to it with her nails, which seemed to be on all … She held utterly still, and counted without looking at anything. …four, five, six hands and/or feet. And that wasn’t counting the muscles around her shoulders and the other two appendages there.
Yes, she had just flown across the room. A room that had grown enormously bigger, and looked like a slightly blurry pixelled picture… No. This was what things looked like through an insect’s compound eyes. And the room hadn’t gotten so much bigger, she had gotten …
The big curve of painted wood she clung to was, in fact, the window-frame. And she was digging into it just a little with three very sharp little nails on each hand/foot, in a vertical position like a 20something free-climber rubber-shoeing his way up a crack in Half Dome.
She looked back at the bed – having to turn her entire head to see the blurry-pixel image of that vast spread. The rumpled state showed that she’d slept in it, and was currently not dreaming. The head-turn also provided the info that she had a yellow furry back bearing translucent insect wings, four of them.
Another dream, of course. Joan reached a three-clawed forefoot to another of her legs and pinched. The sharp little nails scrabbled on the hard surface, and she felt no pain.
If she was dreaming that she was a bee, she had…
By ducking her head down to look between her three rows of legs, she saw the elegantly curved and wicked-looking stinger at the end of her abdomen. Smooth, not barbed – so she was a queen bee, the bee that could sting repeatedly, for combat with other queens. Of course she’d dream herself a queen bee.
Joan sat down, and her own stinger poked her thorax.
Pain like lightning shot through her and she leaped up again, shoulders quivering violently and a squeal escaping her. Her middle throbbed and ached at the site where she’d accidentally stung herself. And realized that she was hovering mid-air, her wings beating.
I’m not dreaming.
I’m a bee.
Dammit, I don’t have time for this! I have too much to do!
I need to inform Sherlock. After that –
No, no more thoughts until she’d notified her partner.
Sniff. Ah, Sherlock was downstairs, in the kitchen making coffee, he hadn’t showered yet, and he was eating some fruit-and-yoghurt combination over frozen waffles. (The sweet smell of the fruit made her stomach ache with hunger.)
Joan headed toward the doorway, and once again her shoulders knew how to quiver at just the right speed to beat the wings she bore. She flew through an Arc de Triomphe-sized doorway and downstairs at a speed like her usual brisk walk, toward the kitchen and the enticing smell of Sherlock’s breakfast (and the less enticing smell of Sherlock himself). She had to make herself stop well-short of the glistening, beautifully-colored fruit topping because everything inside her said Eat, Eat, Eat; she alit onto the table, neat as a veteran pilot’s touchdown.
Sherlock – also that slightly-blurred pixel look to him, but she smelled the change in his chemistry when he saw her. Surprise, worry. “What are you doing out, Your Majesty?” he murmured.
So she was indeed a queen bee. And she’d heard that perfectly, from ears that felt like they were on top of her head and moved about like swiveling fingers… of course, her antennae. “Sherlock, it’s me!” she shouted, and even just listening to herself heard how little her current voice carried – at this register more of a high whine than a voice. There was no sign on his face that he’d heard nor understood her.
At the approach of his cupped hand she leaped up and away out of his reach. If he thought she was a bee who’d gotten free of the roof hives he’d put her in there, and if he did that Joan would either be killed by the queen already in there, or she’d have to kill the queen to save herself; she knew that much about bees. She had to communicate with him.
She flew to his open laptop, currently showing a news webpage about the disappearing board members. The letters on the keys were a little blurred but she could recognize them. She landed on the keyboard (the keys like broad flat tiles that did not move when she dropped onto them, giving her an idea about her current weight). She tried tapping hard on the J and the W, but they wouldn’t move no matter how she pushed. No leverage, no weight behind her to move the keys. Well, that explained why she could fly and had no trouble clinging to the vertical window-sill, but right now this was a problem.
Sherlock approached her holding a jar. Not the hive, it would be deadly to her even if the queen and most of the other bees would be dormant in the winter cold –
Cold. It had been cold last night.
Up and out to the living area. The fireplace was cold, the wood from last night charred or ashes. She landed on the gritty charcoal and scraped at it with all of her hand–feet. To the wall, just out of Sherlock’s reach; land, and walk downward, turning right in a curve. Back to the fireplace.
***
Sherlock halted in the middle of the room, jar still in his hand, and watched the peculiar movements as the escaped queen bee smudged the wall in a long wobbly crook, and flew to the fireplace. Then it flew back to the same spot in the wall, walking in a circle. Away. Back. Up, down, across.
“Stop,” he said, and the bee stopped halfway through its zigzag; the insect obeying his vocal command was an eloquent clue all by itself. He stared at the charcoal tracks the bee had walked on the wall.
J O Δ И.
“WATSON!” Sherlock shouted up toward her room.
***
He knew. He already knew. She could see it in his eyes when he looked at her again, after getting no response from the room upstairs.
“If you can understand me,” he said to her, eyes full of realization and wide with fear, “then please wait right where you are whilst I confirm what I believe you wish to communicate.”
Joan relaxed a little, her wings folding along her back, as Sherlock ran up the stairs and into her room. Her stomach ached with hunger. The fruit on the table smelled so good, so good, just a quick trip over to the table for a taste wouldn’t … She dug in her sharp nails, and waited.
The wait seemed forever. All six of her legs trembled. Her sore throat had kept her drinking tea instead of eating the day before, and now she was so hungry. So hungry.
He came down at last, almost running down the stairs; he smelt of fear, and the incredulous look in his eyes had only brightened. He stood before her wall, with his right hand open and fingers spread. “If you are Joan Watson,” he said in a voice almost level and flat as his conversational tone, “then please fly over here and land on my thumb.”
Watson was already calming down as she buzzed over to stand on the broad ball of her partner’s thumb; the warmth from his skin eddied up to her underbelly. She felt his whole body exhale in relief as well.
“Let’s get you fed first, Watson,” he said.
***
The fruit’s juices on the waffle were thin, watery-tasting; she’d only taken a few gulps when Sherlock pushed over a saucer with a pool of honey on it. Honey – she fell on that like a dog on a steak and all but buried her face in the gorgeous stuff. What a difference; sweet, rich, thick, fragrant, filling, food and drink both. She felt her shoulders warm, her belly stop aching, her legs go still from their agitated quiver. Her tongue was shaped like a three-petaled flower – proboscis, Sherlock would correct her if she’d said it aloud – perfect for scooping up big gobs of the liquid gold.
Sherlock watched her eat without trying to talk to her again. There was relief on his face as well as fear and wonder. Of course, her being missing from her room could have made him as terrified as the time she’d been captured by Mycroft’s French business associates. She’d seen that same fear and relief when they were once again face to face. And now it was the same mix of feelings. Yes, she was safe and yes, she was not in pain. No, she wasn’t all right, she was a goddamn bee. No, she couldn’t seem to talk about it at the moment. Yes, she wanted some sort of rational explanation.
Only after she finished gobbling the sweet sticky feast before her (and automatically running her bristly forearms/forelegs over her face to comb it clean) did she look up at her partner.
A great dark wall descended onto the table, and she leaped up to fly back…and hovered, as the monolithic toppling wall turned out to be a phone Sherlock set flat on the table. He tapped a few app buttons and moved an indicator all the way to one end and sat back. “Watson, first we must establish communication. If you would step onto the phone I can test the microphone’s strength and your own ability to use it.”
Aha. Down again, her hands/feet lightly dug into the phone surface, and walked across the shiny warm surface to the bottom microphone. As loud as she could. “Sherlock, can you hear me?” She jerked her head up at hearing her voice in the room – at a higher pitch, as if she’d been huffing helium, but intelligible nonetheless.
“Yes!” The relief on her partner’s face mirrored what she herself felt. Hurdle one crossed.
A beat later, “What happened?” they asked simultaneously.
***
Sherlock typed up theories on his laptop, with Joan providing input from her perch on the phone. They wound up with a list postulating everything from the homeless woman being a sorceress in disguise who turned Joan into a queen when she called her one (“We’re not in Harry Potter,” Joan said in exasperation at Sherlock’s postulation; “I was speculating more on the monkey’s-paw law of unintended consequences,” he retorted) to someone wealthy and with a grudge against them hiring geneticists to tamper with their DNA in revenge for their imprisoning a CEO or twelve.
One item stood out from that list, first and foremost, and they both saw it. Sherlock took up his regular phone. “Ms. Hudson? Please come to the brownstone at your earliest convenience. And bring the supplements you shared with Watson when you come over – ones I strongly suspect contain some extract of royal jelly. …Yes, you might say Watson had a reaction to them last night.” He cut the connection and caught his lower lip in his teeth. “Suppose I ought to call Detective Bell with our regrets.”
Joan examined one of her hairy forelegs. “I can’t see us joining him today, no.”
***
Marthe Hudson covered her mouth with both hands when Sherlock introduced her to Joan in her current state. “Oh, my god. Joanie, are you okay?”
“Other than being a bee, you mean?” Joan kept her pixelled focus on the microphone. Ms. Hudson smelled of a flowery perfume that Joan wanted to lick from her skin, even though she knew intellectually that the scent wasn’t coming from flowers. “I’m fine.”
“Ms. Hudson, for how long have you been taking these supplements?” Sherlock leaned back in his chair, fingers steepled and touching his nose, eyes level.
“A while. Months. They’ve done wonders for my energy levels and my health.”
Joan leaned over the mic. “If it’s any consolation, Marthe? My sore throat’s gone.”
She huffed out a little laugh. “Well, that’s something, I guess.”
Sherlock pursed his lips. “I find it hard to credit that this – reaction – is listed under possible side-effects.”
“I’ll double-check the bottle.” Hudson took it up and reached in her purse for her reading glasses.
The writing on the bottle was in Greek – “I order them from a supplier in Mykonos” – and royal jelly was indeed the main component of the supplements. Marthe had also brought a printout of the order information, also in Greek, with the website listed at the bottom.
Joan learned a lot more about Greek bees and honey-manufacture in the next few minutes than she’d planned to that day. “Pevko – that’s honey made from pine,” Ms. Hudson elucidated when Sherlock looked at the website, sounding out the word in the advertisement for the supplement; Joan stood on the numbers row of the keyboard trying to read the blurry pixels as best she could. “The wax and royal jelly sold also originate from the same source. Ah, here, I’ve found the disclaimers.” Ms. Hudson adjusted her reading glasses. “’Μπορούν να γίνουν υπνηλία,’ ‘may become sleepy,’ that’s drowsiness as a possible symptom. ‘Δεν λαμβάνουν ασπιρίνη,’ ‘do not take aspirin’ – you didn’t mix it with aspirin, did you, Joanie?”
Joan looked down at her furry thorax and her antennae curled like a two-fingered fist. She flew to the phone. “No,” was all she said.
“All right. Well, I didn’t think that was the problem, but you can’t dismiss everyth–” A long pause. “…Oh.”
That was an eloquent syllable. Joan looked up.
“Elucidate.” Sherlock’s voice was dead still – the level voice he got when he was furious.
Ms. Hudson held up Sherlock’s lens to the bottom of the bottle. “It’s … very small, at the very end of the disclaimer, in what looks like half-point type.” She peered through her reading glasses through the lens at the thin grey line on the bottle. ’Μπορεί να γίνει μια μέλισσα.’“ Ms. Hudson exhaled, bit her lip. “’You may become a honeybee.’”
Silence. Joan’s wings buzzed once.
“Well.” Sherlock stared at the webpage. “I stand corrected.”
***
Marthe Hudson’s command voice was an impressive thing to behold as she paced up and down in the kitchen, living room, and up and down the stairs for nearly 3 hours, snapping Greek into the phone.
Holmes and Watson were not idle in those three hours. Sherlock made lunch for everyone – a large salad for the two humans, and a cap of water to go with the honey-dollop for Watson. Afterward both experimented with which fonts and print sizes on the laptop were the most readable for Joan, who provided feedback via the phone-mic resting on one side of the keyboard, in a process not unlike going to an optometrist to test glasses. By changing fonts, and then point sizes, they discovered that Watson’s bee-eyes could best read OCR-style font, no smaller than 12 points, and after Sherlock had altered the webpage Joan was able to read a police report (on Mr. Sanna, one of the missing CEOs). She was so relieved to be able to read again that she went right back into work-mode and was soon so absorbed in study she almost forgot her current state…until she automatically reached for the mouse to change websites and only dragged one hairy foreleg against the number-key on which she was sitting. However, beating her wings produced a buzz which got Sherlock’s instant attention, and her landing on the mouse and returning to her key transmitted the idea. From then on Joan only needed to buzz her wings once to get a forward-click, and a double buzz (aided by her doing a 180 on the key) for a back-click.
After three reports, Sherlock shook his head. “Watson, we can either work out a pantomime when you are away from the phone, or we can see if you can speak directly into my ear.”
Joan nodded – that she could do, though the only way she could shake her head was side to side. She flew to Sherlock’s shoulder and climbed up to his ear; it was a huge dank cavern lined with bristly hair like an oversized medical model, and she had to refrain from reciting all the parts (pinna, whorl, outer ear, middle ear…). He twitched at the feel of her bee-feet and she could only imagine how they tickled. “Sorry,” she said automatically.
“I heard something.” His voice echoed back to her. “Was that your voice? Try speaking to me again.”
She faced into the odiferous cave, using the same volume as on the phone mic. “Sherlock, can you hear me?”
“Yes, Watson, I can hear you – but faintly, as if far away as well as high-pitched. Can you make your voice a little louder?”
Louder, but lower. She dropped her register, as if auditioning for the bass part of a quartet, or a foghorn, and slowed her words. “How. Is. This?”
“Yes! ‘How is this?’.”
Relief filled her. She could feel his muscles relax too, even from her perch on his warm ear. “You. Can. Hear. Me?”
“It’s higher than your regular voice, but I can hear you.”
“I think I’m getting somewhere!” It was the first thing Marthe had said in English for three hours.
Sherlock was at her side in seconds; Joan still clung to his ear.
“The sales rep sent me to the chemist,” Ms. Hudson said absently, while some dreadful tinny Muzak eddied from the phone in her hand. “Chemist got me his boss, who contacted the shipper and then the distributor. That went to the company’s administrative staff and then to the office manager, and then the CEO’s secretary. Then the CEO.”
“You’ve got the CEO?” Sherlock said.
“No, Ms. Stavros is away on a company retreat right now – but they’ve sent me to her in-house laboratory. I’m waiting to hear from her personal chemist.”
The Muzak stopped.
“Ah. Χαίρετε,” Ms. Hudson greeted the person on the other end of the line, and launched into the same spiel Joan had practically memorized despite knowing no Greek. Supplements. Side effects. Friend of mine. Half-point type.
They were close enough to hear both sides of the discussion. Sherlock translated.
“The chemist – a Mr. Gekas – says they’ve been having some bee die-offs from pesticide use.” He glared at the phone in Ms. Hudson’s hand. Joan patted her partner’s earlobe; Sherlock always took bee deaths personally and for both of them it had just gotten very personal indeed. “So they developed a new fertilizer being used on adjoining fields, created for the purpose of counteracting the neonicotinoids. The bees are doing better. However, Watson, yours is not the first nor only complaint about this particular side-effect of the change – four others as well.”
Four bee-people besides herself. And not a chance of getting their contact information, if this company’s legal department would have a say in the matter.
More Greek from both ends. Sherlock’s smirk was evident in his tone. “Mr. Gekas says his lab is working on negating this particular side-effect.”
“You think?” Joan snapped. Five suits from furious bees with human lawyers would be extraordinarily unforgettable publicity for this company.
Ms Hudson lowered the phone, and everything on her sagged; she looked as tired as Joan felt. “He wouldn’t give me any contact info for the other affected people; probably from their legal department. They’ve issued a recall, finally.”
“Any good news?” Joan snapped into Sherlock’s ear, who was already saying much the same thing in much the same tone.
Ms Hudson tucked a stray whisp of hair back. “Yes. Milos says the effect is temporary.”
Oh thank God.
“How long?” Joan and Sherlock said simultaneously.
Their housekeeper set the phone down. “Well, the four they know about have returned to normal. They all changed back to people after five to ten days, depending on how many of the tablets they took.”
“For two tablets?” Sherlock repeated Joan’s dictation.
“Ten days.”
Sherlock winced at the Mandarin expletive squeaked into his ear.
“Joanie?” Marthe’s face was crumpled with sympathy, one hand reaching out.
“It’s fine,” Watson said. “It’s fine. I’m fine.” Ten days! But we’re in the middle of a case, and I’ve got to talk to Mom, and keep in touch with the Yuns, and get back with Captain Gregson and Paige, and Alfredo’s expecting me tomorrow night for another break-in tutorial, and I’ve got these books to read, and the shelters to visit, and Emily, and …
“Milos?” The interrogative rumble from Sherlock distracted Watson away from her self-pity; she practically felt the eyebrow quirk that always accompanied that tone.
Their housekeeper ducked her head a tiny bit, her cheeks pinker. “Oh. Well, he sketches a bit in his spare time, apparently. He’s emailing me copies of his work. Wants me to know what I think.”
“You were … chatting with him.”
Joan recognized that tone, and threw a command voice into her new register. “Sherlock, I am a queen bee now, which means I can sting repeatedly without endangering myself. If you say one mean thing to her I’ll give you my first one.”
Stillness. “Well done, Ms. Hudson. Your connection to your new friend may prove useful to us as well.”
“Exactly,” Joan bawled into Sherlock’s ear, exasperated. Marthe’s attraction to artistic men – and their enthrallment with her – practically qualified as a super-power.
After repeated reassurances that she’d performed above and beyond in making reparations for her unwitting cause of this, the brownstone residents saw the worried Ms. Hudson off at the door, Watson still clinging to Sherlock’s ear.
When the door closed, Joan dropped her head a moment, her antennae curled forward. She just wanted to wake up from this dream already, and be human and take a shower and put on clothes and not be small enough to get stepped on – which was apparently too much to ask these days.
Ten days. The earlobe under her feet was warm. She was so tired…
Sherlock went back to his laptop, and only when he was seated at his desk did he register that though the little tickly feet still clung to his ear he hadn’t felt any movement nor heard speech for a minute or so. “Watson?”
A tiny, high-pitched version of Joan Watson's snore was the only response.
Lips pursed in amusement, Sherlock settled in to read the reports looking for links. Perhaps this time he would avoid waking her.
***
Joan awoke, relieved that her dream of being a bee… She counted her appendages – four, five, six – and her wings drooped a little.
“Your supper is on the table, Watson. Ms. Hudson was considerate enough to buy it and drop it off.”
Puzzled, she headed over to the kitchen, and saw four little jars of honey lined up, all opened, and with a blob of the honey from each on the inside of its corresponding lid before the jars. Orange blossom; blackberry blossom; wildflower; elderflower. She’d left Joan a bee buffet to try out.
The novelty of playing honey connoisseur occupied her as much as the business of eating, and she was in a much better mood when she returned to her partner’s shoulder to read the screen. The fourth name made it click, and she flew down to her mic. “Mr. Agnos. Sherlock, you see the pattern in the executives’ surnames.”
“A multinational corporation. And yet every disappearance is someone with a Greek surname. Indeed. Coincidence, I’m quite sure.” Of course his expression said no such thing.
“I think Mr. Gekas didn’t know about all the people affected by the supplement. I’ll bet those four he knew were self-reported, or had family who contacted them the way you and Marthe got him.”
“But if someone knew about the effect of the supplement…” Sherlock stroked his chin. “This would be a way to remove board members besides kidnapping or murder.”
“Deliberately transformed into bees?” Joan indicated her own corpus with a wave of one foreleg.
His eyebrow quirked. “Are you quite sure we’re not in Harry Potter?”
Joan ignored that, caught up in the theory. “Side-effect of one pill is five days as a bee. But how long have they been missing? And what if it wasn’t a dosage accident, but a deliberate poisoning? How many pills would it take to keep them bees long enough…”
Sherlock went still. “Assuming fertile women and men transformed into their bee counterparts, that would mean queens and drones. A drone’s life is 90 days long. Eighteen pills would be a death sentence for a man. But if all the women become queens as you did, they’d merely be trapped for weeks without endangering their lives – a queen can live for 5 years.”
“The corporation has an NYC headquarters. I could head over there to do some spy–”
“Out of the question.” Sherlock’s response was so swift and adamant that Joan’s finger-ears flattened against her head. His eyes were black and unreflective. “You are not going outside until you are no longer a bee.”
Joan felt her temper, strong and icy, rise up. She crouched over the mike and glared back at Sherlock (with all five eyes). “Excuse me? Was that an order from you, Sherlock?” She made herself sound as stern and commanding as possible even as her voice came out in Alvin the Chipmunk’s register. “I may look like a bug right now, partner, but the last time I checked I was an adult. You’re not my father to ground me for wearing a strapless dress.”
“No, but I am an apiarist who’s been watching bee deaths escalate from toxins in the world outside,” he snapped.
“So I take my meals here and try to minimize breathing in car exhaust!”
He gestured wildly at a window. “That is hardly the beginning and end of the dangers a solitary insect faces in the world beyond that window! A short list of bee predators that dwell within 50 feet of this building include skunks, opossums, pigeons, rats, other bees, and Clyde.”
Joan’s head swiveled in the direction of the aquarium where the tortoise had dozed through the entire dramatic day. The thought of being eaten by their pet, even as an accident, felt like betrayal. “So I’m relatively safer here as long as I don’t go into Clyde’s tank. But what if I stayed with you, when we were outside?”
His angry shout was laced with fear. “It’s dangerous outside for you right now!”
“As opposed to how safe it is for me as a small woman in New York City? One who’s now known to associate with you and/or Mycroft?”
That stilled him. Twice, now, she had been in the grip of murderous people only because of her attachment to the Holmes brothers, without benefit of metamorphosis.
She continued, angry and low. “We are partners, Sherlock. We’re better together, and you know it. I still have a brain, and now I have a stinger.” The more Joan thought about the idea the more she liked it. “Think of how we talked to Ms. Hudson at the phone today. I stay on your ear like a Bluetooth, or hang on to your hair near your ear, so we can keep in touch. I might not be able to drive a car, but there’s got to be some advantage to having a small overlooked associate who can fly.”
He blinked at that.
“Or I could spend ten days flying in circles here and going nuts from not doing anything – right when my current condition is an actual lead for our case.”
And she knew she’d won when he said, after a very long glazed-eye silence, “Exactly how many friends and family members do you plan to bring into our confidence on this?”
“We lie. Say I got the flu, which would keep me here for a couple of weeks.”
Sherlock smiled.
And Joan was astonished at how her entire body relaxed at the thought of postponing all her regular socialization and concentrating solely on their work.
Holmes stood. “In that case, Watson, we have a call to pay on KafCorp’s NY branch. Yeesh.” This last said with a tiny shudder as Watson flew over and again crawled on his ear with her tickly little bee-feet.
“Suck it up, partner.”
***
In a mid-level office with a park view Sherlock greeted and spoke to several of the executives; Mr. Jacowicz, Mr. Gilchrist, Ms. Basarnian, Mr. Salo. They were aware of the disappearances of their European compatriots, but had put it down to the unfortunate civil problems going on in Greece. They gave him some files on the missing people.
During the talk Watson stayed hidden in Sherlock’s hair, surrounded by the odours inherent in her surroundings. Nothing smelled like heroin, it had finally left even its imprint on his hair smell, and she was pleased at that. But another, familiar scent tickled her receptors, even beyond the unpleasant cigarette-breath from several of the executives. She swiveled her head, curled her antennae. The same smell as –
“Sherlock, I smell the same supplement here. The exact same. I’ll be right back,” she called in his ear, and dropped down to the back of his chair before flying away. Sherlock made a half-exclamation and half-turned but stopped himself not to draw attention.
Stay high, out of swatting range, swoop past the buzz-saw-shaped sprinkler heads, down the corridor and up to the closed door with the combination-lock. She dropped to the ground and crawled under the door like she was playing army with Oren, squeezing between the top of the door and the rough flat-pile office carpet.
The light was off and the room had no window. She couldn’t see anything, but the smell of royal-jelly tablets was overwhelming. Bottles of them here. Hundreds of pills, enough to turn lots of people into bees and keep them that way for weeks. These people knew what they were doing.
She squeezed back out and flew straight into the face of a woman heading for the toilet next to that door.
Both yelled and Joan headed for the ceiling at Mach 10 just ahead of the woman’s swinging hand. She sat on the round metal sprinkler head gasping for breath and fanning her wings to cool herself down while the human woman below did the same (“Kishaar, you okay?” “A bug, a, a big bee, in my face. I’m okay”). So much for stealth.
She waited until both women retreated into the bathroom before heading back, hearing anxiety in Sherlock’s suave tone as he deduced various people’s histories (stalling for her, how sweet). “Ah, thank you very much, I must be going,” he said at the smack of a big bug landing on the back of his head, and exited the offices.
As Watson expected, Holmes’ anger at Joan’s recklessness was instantly assuaged when she climbed to his ear and made her report. “Short version,” she concluded as the elevator began its descent. “They know. I think someone discovered what these pills do, bought out the toxic run, and the board is currently staging a bloodless coup with them. They may have had one of their people in Greece put the pills in their co-chairs’ food or beverage as a test, in a place where disappearances of business executives would be lost in the general austerity breakdown.”
“That would also explain why so few transfigurations have been reported. They got most of them out of circulation.”
“So, we know about the stash, and I don’t think we tipped them off.”
The cold pit hit her at the same time she saw the look on Sherlock’s. “Until I flew into that woman’s face.”
The same note in his voice even as he pulled out his phone. “They are the very last office that would be blasé about large insects in their presence. Yes, Detective Bell!”
***
The warrant got them into KafCorp NYC’s locked windowless stash room within the hour – and it was still half-full of the toxic pills employees had been destroying when the NYPD came in. But even as the cuffs came out, they saw that most of the faces from Sherlock’s visit there earlier were gone. Sherlock cursed and Joan followed suit. The opened bottle on the desk told her what had happened to them.
So did the smell of her approaching attackers.
Four enormous bees swooped at the humans, buzzing furiously. No; three flew at Sherlock, and one flew directly at Watson. A bee as big as her, smelling of anger, flexing an unbarbed stinger meant for mortal combat. Another queen.
Det. Bell yelled at the sight of the bees in the room; some cops cursed and ducked down with their handcuffed charges. Sherlock stood stock-still, a man unafraid of dealing with such creatures and a few stings.
The board members. Three men, one woman. A queen, and three –
“Drones!” she yelled in Sherlock’s ear and leaped into the air. The queen – Ms. Basarnian – veered after her.
She fled down the hall, diving and swooping to break up the flight pattern and keep her pursuer from anticipating her moves. It added distance to the flight but it was a risk she was willing to take. Amusing to see the humans, police and executives alike, cursing and ducking to avoid the two queens.
In a hive there can be only one queen; any rival is challenged to mortal combat (the reason for the queen’s barbless stinger, to be used multiple times against other queens). But this wasn’t the queen-bee instinct to sting a rival to death; this was plain old human-criminal killing of their witnesses.
If Watson stood her ground and locked stingers with Ms. Basarnian, she’d either die or deliberately kill another human being for the first time in her life (temporary bees though they were). She could take the Life of Brian approach to gladiatorial combat and simply see how long she could outrun her opponent. But there was also a third way…
Watson dropped straight down a stack of files and shot across the storage room millimeters from the carpet like a pelican skimming the ocean surface. Basarnian followed, uttering a shout that was just a plain old expletive.
Catch me if you can. I jog every morning, and you smoke. What kind of stamina can you have?
Joan swooped up and bore straight for her partner. He stood, braced and bright-eyed, a charcoal-grey container in one hand, and his other hand open and facing up. Clever, that’s how he’d tell them apart... She landed neatly on the ball of his thumb as she’d done in the brownstone. He nodded curtly once, and flicked her to the side just as Basarnian caught up. Watson landed on the desk, and Basarnian’s descent was engulfed in charcoal-grey and borne to the surface. The upside-down coffee mug bearing the KafCorp logo muffled the executive’s buzzing and high-pitched profanity. Other overturned containers – a pencil-holder, a small trophy from a kid’s soccer game, and another coffee mug – buzzed in the same muffled way.
A log-sized forefinger was extended, crooked away from her. Only then did Watson feel how exhausted she was; her belly felt pinched with ravening hunger once again. She waddled across the table to climb onto her partner’s finger for a return to his ear.
“Drones,” Sherlock said to the other police, who stared at the crazy guy who caught bees in his bare hands. “Male bees have no stingers. We were all perfectly safe. For the most part. And yes, they’re a vital clue to the scheme that’s been unfolding, which is why we need to keep them alive.” And her warning meant he knew he wouldn’t be stung, catching the other three.
“Sherlock, looks like you missed one.” Marcus Bell reached out his hand to gather Joan.
“Thank you, Detective Bell, I have her.” Holmes reached up smoothly to encase Watson in his own warm hand. “Excellent observational skills.”
Bell shook his head. “This was a weird one. I’m sorry Joan missed out on it. She’s got the flu? I may have to bring some soup over later.”
“Possibly in another week, Detective. In the meantime, I’ll take care of these bees.”
Once Bell was back to helping round up the human executives, Sherlock set Joan back on her pinna perch and took out some evidence bags, using a mechanical pencil to poke a few tiny air-holes in each one. “I have a spare glassed-in bee-frame that will make an ideal prison for these four until they change back. In the meantime, Watson, I have a feeling that all five of you need to eat.”
“Yes,” Joan bellowed.
***
The four incarcerated bees refused to talk to Joan, though they clearly could speak – “Not without my lawyer” – and lapped up honey when released into the glassed bee-frame; they remained in Sherlock’s room to protect them from the elements. But the sobering sight of two of the four dead the next day, curled on the bottom of the bee-frame – one of them the queen – sent chills down both. Sherlock carefully extracted the two corpses and examined them. “Nicotine residue in their lungs from the smoking they did as people just before they took the pills. Neonicotinoids are fatal to bees. A pity they chose to avoid incarceration by inadvertently sentencing themselves to death.”
The remaining two drones – Messrs. Jacowicz and Salo – did not cause any trouble, but they wouldn’t talk either, except to answer “One” when Joan asked them how many pills they’d each taken. Their interrogations about the disappearances of the Greek executives would wait until they regained human form. (Which they did, five days later – to find that Sherlock had moved the frame into the basement panic-room, precluding their escape; Bell took the cuffed men into custody. Ms. Hudson’s tear-eyed announcement that Miklos had cut off communication with her without warning let them know who was the likely contact that had notified KafCorp about the supplements and who’d gone into hiding himself.)
The rest of the whole bizarre situation was anticlimactic.
Sherlock began setting a bit of tea in a teaspoon next to his partner’s morning blob of honey, and breakfast became a civilized meal once again. After breakfast, usually at her encouragement, Sherlock went outside for a jog around the park, both to stay active and to give Watson some outside fresh air and flying exercise as she paced him. (“That’s the one thing that’s a bit disappointing in all this,” she confided at her partner’s query. “Flying just feels like walking for me, there’s nothing special about it.”)
In the afternoon Watson read her cold-case files (with an obliging Sherlock or Ms. Hudson turning pages for her). Writing was a puzzle – the charcoal was too messy – until Ms. Hudson fashioned bee-sized Roman writing-tablets for her from sections of a wooden paint-stirrer covered with a thin layer of wax on which Joan could scratch her notes with her clawed bee-feet. “Your writing is so tiny and so perfect,” Marthe marveled, bent over to see the marks. “There’s a market for dollhouse miniatures. If you ever want to go in for calligraphy…”
Joan took her evening honey-dab just before the sun went down, and was asleep 15 minutes later, curled near the radiator in her room for warmth.
Joan’s wings might not make a difference, but her stinger did the one and only time she used it – the day a hitman sent by an aggrieved and wealthy felon thought he had Holmes alone in an alley and got a stab in the precise cluster of nerves on his neck to make him scream and drop the gun, and then get dropped by Sherlock’s baton. “Not a word, Watson,” Holmes warned his smug partner as he cuffed his assailant. “Not one ‘I told you so.’” “Moi?” Watson responded.
Hours became days, became a week, became more. Aside from one semi-perilous incident when she tried to talk to Clyde in his tank and was snapped at instead (and then snapped at by a frightened Sherlock), she remained safe.
A schedule of uninterrupted sleep, regular meals, mentally-challenging work, and healthy physical activity is good for everyone – but especially good for people who’ve been overdoing the work element at the expense of many of the others. Watson slept deeply and ate well and stayed mentally and physically active; she felt well-rested and at peace in her enforced quarantine from her outside contacts, comfortable in her 250-milligram corpus. One set of Ms. Hudson’s wax slates was reserved for her diary, as she took notes on the patient’s progress.
And one morning in the second week she awoke and stretched her wings and there was nothing to stretch. The radiator was too hot on her back, all the long bare-skinned length of her back, and the wooden floor felt hard where her solid heavy weight pressed. Again she stretched, and counted. One, two, three…four. She blinked. Two eyes, two binocular, clear-focused eyes. Hair, only atop her head and longer than her bee-fuzz. Ears that didn’t move. A tongue that wasn’t shaped like a flower. She sat up – on an actual pair of bipedal buttocks with no stinger in the way.
She dragged herself, staggering, to her two bare feet, and spent a few minutes lurching around the room and getting used to being five foot something and vertical in a suddenly-smaller room, instead of four centimeters and horizontal. She sniffed the air and smelled tea but nothing else; after her bee-senses her nose almost felt blocked.
Only one thing she absolutely needed to do now, before anything else… She stumbled into the shower and didn’t come out for an hour.
Sherlock didn’t even look up from his laptop and tea at the kitchen table, but the ear-to-ear grin spoke enough for him, as did the jovial tone. “Watson. I thought I heard the dulcet sound of your feet stomping down the stairs. Breakfast?”
“I want four eggs, half a pound of bacon, a couple of bagels with cream cheese, a bowl of soup with dumplings, and anything else that bees don’t eat. My god, I can say all that without roaring in basso profundo.” Watson poured a mug of tea and downed half of it on her way to the fridge.
He watched her pull out refrigerator contents and start the heat under an omelet pan. “You ought to get a full medical check-up as a precaution–”
“Can’t talk. Eating.”
Sherlock returned to his tea and research while his partner threw together and began to devour a meal not far off the wish-list she’d rattled off.
He heard her swallow, and then take a deep breath – the kind of inhalation one makes after a prodigious meal eaten too quickly for proper respiration. “I need to call Marthe, she’ll be relieved. I’ll let Marcus know I’m better, but I’m taking one more day to make sure I’m not contagious. We’ll eventually need to talk to our former drones and find who else was in on the plot. I assume the rest of their pills are in Evidence.”
“Correct.” Sherlock closed his laptop and pushed it away.
Joan nodded. “I can still do stuff from here today. I’ve got to call Oren and Mom; I’ve been out of the loop. I have to get used to walking instead of flying, and I’d better not drive for a few days, either, my eyes are still adjusting. And I’ve got to transcribe my notes; I’ll need your microscope. The rest can wait a day or two.” She stretched, waving her shoulders and making a face. “Feels like something’s missing.”
“Well, now that you’re in no danger of being eaten by our tortoise or stabbed to death by another insect, my own schedule can resume as well.” Sherlock tapped his closed laptop. “I’ve emailed Randy to let him know I’ll join him at a support group in two hours.”
Everyone was back to normal, it seemed.
***
There were changes, though.
That first afternoon back, while transcribing her bee-notes from the KafCorp case and her makeshift journal, she began to feel tired; instead of making tea and soldiering through Watson immediately turned everything off and headed to her room for a nap. When she awoke she called her counselor Helen to resume her appointments, and also contacted Emily.
Over the days following her return, Watson resumed her social contacts at New York speed – the station, her mother and brother, her half-sister’s family, Captain Gregson, the shelters, her training sessions with Alfredo. One day was wholly taken up in her visiting two graves, one marking the end of her medical career and the other a casualty of her current one; she said nothing on her return and her eyes were red, and Sherlock said nothing either.
The partners listened to Jacowicz and Salo’s questioning sessions about their hoarding a non-FDA-regulated drug associated with several disappearances including those of their two colleagues. (Oddly, their “amnesia” cleared right up when Joan let them both know that they were not the only former bees in the room.)
“Your temporary life as an Apis genus seems to have made you even more busy,” her partner remarked one warm spring evening when he found her on the roof, ostensibly poring over a cold-case file.
“Mm?” Joan didn’t look away from the hive she’d been studying for an hour. “I don’t feel busier. If anything, it’s like I’ve slowed down.” She did feel slowed down; more relaxed and calm, more sure of her work and her place here, less stressed from her duties. Yet she was back to her breakneck schedule from before Ms. Hudson’s pills.
Except…that she now ensured that obligations were spaced out, rarely more than one or two a day, and regularly interspersed with self-care – sessions with her counselor, a lunch-date with Emily, practicing her Mandarin with Mrs. Yun. Staring at Sherlock’s bees and wondering if she could have befriended the Watsonia queen in her former state.
“I fear you’d have had the same success as you did with Clyde.” Sherlock handed her a mug. “Animals must follow their natures, Watson.” Chamomile, good for winding down to sleep.
Joan accepted the tea. She didn’t need Sherlock’s gifts to understand how he’d followed her train of thought. “It’s clearly my nature to work. But I needed to take care of myself better, and I’ve been doing a lot more of that lately. Funny how fast that becomes a priority when a missed meal means you’ll starve, or if you get too tired you’ll fall down dead.”
Sherlock sat beside her. “I believe the cliché is ‘stop to smell the roses.’ Which is an apt description of a bee’s life.”
“And it wasn’t a bad one. It might even have taught me a valuable lesson about pacing myself.” Joan smiled at the steadily frantic insects. “But I’ll stick to aspirin next time I get sick.”
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no subject
Date: 2016-06-03 03:17 pm (UTC)This was really fun, and I love all the thought that clearly went into it. Thanks so much for sharing this! <3 Bee-lightful! :)
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Date: 2016-06-20 10:45 pm (UTC)Joan Watson is very driven - valedictorian, quit being a surgeon when she lost her first patient, takes NONE of Sherlock's crap. So I figured she'd still be trying to do her work as Holmes' partner even turned into a big bug.
no subject
Date: 2016-06-03 03:40 pm (UTC)Somehow, despite putting "animal transformation" in my list of likes, it did not occur to me that with an Elementary fic that might mean someone transforming into a bee. I am just tickled with the result! Joan's experience of her bee body is so wonderfully bizarre, and the way she underreacts, goes straight to problem-solving (communicating with Sherlock, getting back to the case) and uses that to distract herself from a truly terrifying ordeal, is just so perfectly Joan.
Marthe is fabulous, I love her muse powers, and Joan wanting to lick her all over, and the way she turns out to be the key to the case! Sherlock's fretting over Joan's safety is perfect -- Joan and bees, practically the only beings in the world he worries about and wants to keep safe, now combined for greater efficiency! The case itself is so fantastically bizarre and while it's a bit more fantastical than the usual Elementary pseudo-science-fictional bent, it actually fits surprisingly well tonally.
And I am just so happy that spending a week and a half as a bee taught Joan to take better care of herself -- I totally buy that the social obligations would be the heaviest drain but that she would feel incapable of limiting them until she was forcibly (though temporarily) severed from them. I'm very glad she has better balance going forward!
Other delights, in no particular order: Joan's microscopic copperplate handwriting; basso profundo; Clyde snapping at Joan-in-bee-form (I'm sure he was apologetic afterward!); Sherlock's clever way of telling the two queens apart. Probably half a dozen other things I'm forgetting right now!
In short (HA!), thank you SO MUCH for this, I spent the entire 8000 words grinning dazedly and will probably be chuckling about it all day at work.
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Date: 2016-06-20 10:59 pm (UTC)I am sorry I couldn't go further into the Joan Watson / Ms Hudson attraction, but there's only so much a human and a bee can do. And it would be rather one-sided, as Ms Hudson is canonically attracted only to artistic men who can keep her around as a Muse. Since Ms Hudson's gotten a raw deal on the show after the promise we were given in "Snow Angels" I needed to restore some of her awesomeness.
This isn't my "Joan's Beez" series where Ms. Hudson and Clyde can communicate with each other and Clyde assists the humans in crime-solving. Clyde's a reptile, which means his brain has two main modes: Eat and Sleep. And tortoises eat bees. Sadly, to him Joan was just another potential snack.
I wrote this as a one-off. But I still have that Evidence warehouse full of bee-transformation pills...
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Date: 2016-06-04 01:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-06-20 11:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-06-05 05:25 am (UTC)Well done!
[edited because I forgot to actually insert the footnote on the first pass]
*Thematic clues aside, one need only apply a thoughtful eye to certain kudos to reach the inevitable conclusion....
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Date: 2016-06-05 01:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-06-20 11:08 pm (UTC)Thanks so much for the compliment! I've written a bit of s.f. and fantasy to sell, so I'm pretty good at the "...and then what?" part of the story-building after a weird idea pops up. Joan Watson is such a driven person, I can see her just being irritated that she's a bug because it's cutting into her workload. And of course Sherlock warring between factoring in his new tiny assistant in his plans and his fear for Queen!Joan's safety as an apiarist.
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Date: 2016-06-05 10:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-06-20 11:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-06-06 11:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-06-20 11:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-06-21 04:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-06-30 06:19 am (UTC)This isn't set in my "Joan's Beez" 'verse - Clyde can't talk to Ms. Hudson, and Joan never communicates with the Watsonia bees - but I had fun writing a fix-it for Kafka's bug book. (If only Gregor Samsa had had Joan's caring and supportive social network instead of his toxic family.)