Fic for gardnerhill: An L.A. Story
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holmesticeTitle: An L.A. Story
Recipient:gardnerhill
Author:phoenixfalls
Verse: Elementary
Characters/Pairings: Sherlock Holmes/Ms. Hudson
Rating: Mature
Warnings: None
Tags: First Meetings, Background Casefic, BDSM
Summary: Sherlock would always be associated with sunshine for Marthe.
Also on AO3: An L.A. Story
Sherlock would always be associated with sunshine for Marthe. With sunshine, and flat blue skies, and wide, winding highways. This was, of course, because for the first few months of their friendship Marthe was little more to Sherlock than his chauffeur.
It was the second summer Marthe spent in Los Angeles. She was living with Jonathan then, in a little bungalow in the South Bay about a mile from the beach. Her ’94 Toyota Corolla stood out oddly among the high-end hybrids and SUVs of the neighbors, but not as much as Jonathan himself did, with his carefully forked out afro and his preference for fine tailoring and expensive shoes over distressed jeans and flip-flops.
She and Jonathan were past the first blush of their relationship, where they spent nearly all their time together. Jonathan was wrapped up in work on his screenplay, a story he described as “L.A. Confidential meets Training Day.” So Marthe was somewhat at loose ends when she fell into Sherlock’s orbit.
He was spectacularly ill-equipped to investigate anything in Los Angeles, given that he had neither driver’s license nor access to a vehicle, but he was hot on the trail of an embezzler that had graduated to murder and conscripted Marthe to drive him around after only the briefest acquaintance.
She must have put a thousand miles on her car over the course of six weeks, learning the freeway system in a way she had not bothered to before: following leads up the 405 into the Valley; driving much farther east on the 10 than Jonathan had ever taken her; getting turned around in the maze of one-way streets downtown; even climbing 3,200 feet into the mountains to the north on the 14.
They seemed to climb forever, the Corolla’s four-cylinder engine just managing to maintain 60 mph, until they finally crested a high, narrow pass that opened out onto a wide, flat valley in an impressively ugly range of browns and tans. There was a city there, a mess of suburban sprawl stretching haphazardly through the desert, but instead of pointing to an exit Sherlock just directed Marthe to keep driving.
City passed, the highway seemed to stretch endlessly, a straight line to the horizon. The roads were all at right angles, and eventually Sherlock told Marthe to take one of them, a single right turn and then yet more constant, flat speed over constant, flat dirt.
Sherlock was never the most restful of traveling companions; he fidgeted, and played incessantly with the radio, and twisted himself into knots in the passenger seat trying to get a signal on his phone, just to lose it within seconds as the neverending road spun out behind them.
But that day he was even more twitchy than usual, plucking restlessly at his clothing, distracted from their purpose (still unexplained to Marthe) in driving all this way into the backwaters of L.A. And finally something in Sherlock’s peculiar jitteriness clicked for Marthe, revealed itself to be a shape that she recognized.
Marthe had assumed, after learning of Sherlock’s profession, that the circumstances of their meeting – Sherlock tied down to a table, blindfolded and stripped to the waist, on display and at the whim of a party of Hollywood execs and B-list actors – were purely case-related, a way of gaining access to an exclusive crowd without garnering any suspicion. But while Marthe had never really been in the kink scene, she had been in adjacent-enough communities, and had been friends and lovers with kinky-enough people, that she thought now that Sherlock submission that night had perhaps not been entirely feigned.
And with that suspicion, Marthe wondered if Sherlock could possibly have been as sanguine about the scene he found himself in that night as he professed.
Marthe had been drawn to him because he looked young and a little lost; she had watched as party guests dabbled in the sensation play he was set up for, dripping colorful wax on his skin, running a tickler or a Wartenberg wheel across his chest and abdomen, watching his reactions to the unpredictable sensations. But there appeared to be no one watching out for him, monitoring to see that he was coming to no harm, and so Marthe had taken it upon herself to check in with him periodically, asking if he needed a break or water or wanted to pause.
She checked in with him so often, in fact, that he eventually hissed that he was busy trying to catch a murderer and she should mind her own business. But when the party was winding down and he had been released from the cuffs by their absent-minded host, he sought her out and introduced himself, thanked her for her care and asked if she wanted to help him with his case.
Which is what led her here, to this desert, where more buildings had appeared on the horizon, and Sherlock finally told her she could pull off the highway and park.
They were in a town called California City. A quintessential California boom town, filled with rapidly built subdivisions of identical modest ranch houses and the absolute latest in urban planning, circa 1960; but in this case the boom never came. The huckster of a real estate agent whose brilliant idea it was to found the city failed to convert much of anyone at all to his vision, and so now cracked pavement ended abruptly in desert dirt, and while the town could support a liquor store and a payday loan office, it did not even appear to have a grocery store.
They parked in front of the local Lions club, where Sherlock wished to interview several of the members, each of them more shaky and rambling than the last. Sherlock still seemed off his game as Marthe had observed it to date, by turns sharply frustrated and nearly absent-minded. But something in what they told him led them to the town’s Central Park, Sherlock pushing the pace despite the oppressive summer heat.
The park had pretty bones – low, sculpted hills, winding paths, a meandering creek and carefully shaped pond surrounded by eucalyptus trees. But every inch of it spoke of neglect: the padlocked bathrooms, the patchiness of the grass, the shrubbery growing into the paths, the slightly off odor of the water. And there was not another soul anywhere within sight.
They made their way deeper in, past some machinery (likely for the pond) gamely chugging away in the heat, creaky and cantankerous but apparently still operational. Sherlock started at the sputter of the generator, and nearly jumped when a car backfired in the distance. The trees grew close around them, leaves murmuring in the breeze kicking up from the west. Just as the path narrowed far enough to force them to walk single-file, it opened out into a small clearing.
And here, apparently, was their destination, because Sherlock started into a run. They clambered gracelessly over a chain-link fence that was losing its fight with gravity, then began to pick their way through broken concrete and abandoned building materials towards what was once clearly intended to be a gracious and welcoming hotel.
One whole face of the building was exposed, like a dollhouse, displaying all its rooms. The floors creaked threateningly as they made their way through the lobby and up the staircase. Sherlock began searching the rooms for something, but he waved Marthe irritably off when she asked what exactly he was searching for so that she could help. He moved through the space frenetically, careless of the building materials stacked haphazardly all around, of the exposed bits of wiring that no one ever got around to hiding behind drywall. And the further in they moved, the higher they climbed, the more the building seemed to sway around them.
Eventually, something gave. Sherlock’s foot went through a floorboard, and as he flailed trying to right himself he knocked over a stack of two-by-fours. Marthe jumped out of the way and grabbed his arm, pulling him back to more solid ground, but when the dust settled and she was sure that nothing else was going to fall, she found him staring, transfixed, at the long gash that one of the falling planks had left on his arm.
His pupils were blown wide with adrenaline, and his breathing was shallow, but Marthe suspected the reaction was not solely a result of the near-fall.
“Sherlock.”
No response.
“Sherlock.” More forcefully.
He blinked, but still did not take his eyes off the blood welling up through the jagged tear in his flesh.
Marthe took a breath to gather herself, then made her voice crack out like a whip into the silence.
“Sherlock. Enough.” And she took his hand to pull the wound out of his sight.
He blinked, muddled, for a moment, then snapped back into focus on Marthe’s face. She watched his hackles rise as he recognized his vulnerability and moved to defend against it.
“Really, Ms. Hudson, I must ask that you unhand me—“
Acting on instinct, Marthe grabbed his uninjured arm and dug her nails sharply into the underside of his wrist.
“Enough. You are in no fit state to continue investigating today. We are going to get your arm cleaned up and then find an actual, working motel. You can continue in the morning.”
Sherlock opened his mouth to protest again, but stilled at the firmly negative shake of her head. Marthe switched her grip to encircle rather than prick his wrist, then led him carefully back outside into the sun.
He assured her that he had recently had a tetanus shot, so they found the town’s sole drug store and cleaned him up in the bathroom of the McDonald’s next door. There was a motel half a mile back down the highway that seemed clean enough, but it wasn’t until the door to their room was closed and locked that Marthe finally broke contact with Sherlock’s skin.
When she met his eyes again, after putting several feet of space deliberately between them, she found him watching her with sharp curiosity.
“I would not have pegged you as Dominant at all.”
Marthe rolled her eyes. “Just because I don’t particularly enjoy it doesn’t mean I can’t see a need and choose to fill it.”
Sherlock huffed right back. “I would hardly characterize it as a need. . .”
“Sherlock.”
“Very well. Perhaps I have found, on occasion, that the world is. . . distracting. And that there are. . . activities. . . that I can undertake, which better allow me to focus.”
Marthe made her voice very gentle. “I offered to help you solve this case in whatever way you needed, Sherlock. I truly did mean that.”
And he smiled, shy and suddenly sweet. “Oh. Well then. Yes. Please.”
He woke the next morning just as the sun was breaking the horizon and tumbled Marthe unceremoniously out of bed, demanding she move faster, faster. He rushed unerringly back to the tumble-down hotel in the park, to one of the rooms he had searched restlessly the day before and, carefully now, pried apart a rusty toolbox to expose a sheaf of letters, weathered with age. He flipped through the first couple and then crowed, finding the admission he needed.
The LAPD took his suspect into custody only a few hours later.
In all the years since, Sherlock had only asked Marthe to help him in that way two more times; he began turning to professionals rather than risk his needs interfering with his cases again. But she held the memory of him kneeling in the middle of that motel bed, expression broken open and so brightly trusting, close to her heart, to keep her warm when her own doubts and the loudness of the world around her began to wear.
Recipient:
gardnerhillAuthor:
phoenixfalls Verse: Elementary
Characters/Pairings: Sherlock Holmes/Ms. Hudson
Rating: Mature
Warnings: None
Tags: First Meetings, Background Casefic, BDSM
Summary: Sherlock would always be associated with sunshine for Marthe.
Also on AO3: An L.A. Story
Sherlock would always be associated with sunshine for Marthe. With sunshine, and flat blue skies, and wide, winding highways. This was, of course, because for the first few months of their friendship Marthe was little more to Sherlock than his chauffeur.
It was the second summer Marthe spent in Los Angeles. She was living with Jonathan then, in a little bungalow in the South Bay about a mile from the beach. Her ’94 Toyota Corolla stood out oddly among the high-end hybrids and SUVs of the neighbors, but not as much as Jonathan himself did, with his carefully forked out afro and his preference for fine tailoring and expensive shoes over distressed jeans and flip-flops.
She and Jonathan were past the first blush of their relationship, where they spent nearly all their time together. Jonathan was wrapped up in work on his screenplay, a story he described as “L.A. Confidential meets Training Day.” So Marthe was somewhat at loose ends when she fell into Sherlock’s orbit.
He was spectacularly ill-equipped to investigate anything in Los Angeles, given that he had neither driver’s license nor access to a vehicle, but he was hot on the trail of an embezzler that had graduated to murder and conscripted Marthe to drive him around after only the briefest acquaintance.
She must have put a thousand miles on her car over the course of six weeks, learning the freeway system in a way she had not bothered to before: following leads up the 405 into the Valley; driving much farther east on the 10 than Jonathan had ever taken her; getting turned around in the maze of one-way streets downtown; even climbing 3,200 feet into the mountains to the north on the 14.
They seemed to climb forever, the Corolla’s four-cylinder engine just managing to maintain 60 mph, until they finally crested a high, narrow pass that opened out onto a wide, flat valley in an impressively ugly range of browns and tans. There was a city there, a mess of suburban sprawl stretching haphazardly through the desert, but instead of pointing to an exit Sherlock just directed Marthe to keep driving.
City passed, the highway seemed to stretch endlessly, a straight line to the horizon. The roads were all at right angles, and eventually Sherlock told Marthe to take one of them, a single right turn and then yet more constant, flat speed over constant, flat dirt.
Sherlock was never the most restful of traveling companions; he fidgeted, and played incessantly with the radio, and twisted himself into knots in the passenger seat trying to get a signal on his phone, just to lose it within seconds as the neverending road spun out behind them.
But that day he was even more twitchy than usual, plucking restlessly at his clothing, distracted from their purpose (still unexplained to Marthe) in driving all this way into the backwaters of L.A. And finally something in Sherlock’s peculiar jitteriness clicked for Marthe, revealed itself to be a shape that she recognized.
Marthe had assumed, after learning of Sherlock’s profession, that the circumstances of their meeting – Sherlock tied down to a table, blindfolded and stripped to the waist, on display and at the whim of a party of Hollywood execs and B-list actors – were purely case-related, a way of gaining access to an exclusive crowd without garnering any suspicion. But while Marthe had never really been in the kink scene, she had been in adjacent-enough communities, and had been friends and lovers with kinky-enough people, that she thought now that Sherlock submission that night had perhaps not been entirely feigned.
And with that suspicion, Marthe wondered if Sherlock could possibly have been as sanguine about the scene he found himself in that night as he professed.
Marthe had been drawn to him because he looked young and a little lost; she had watched as party guests dabbled in the sensation play he was set up for, dripping colorful wax on his skin, running a tickler or a Wartenberg wheel across his chest and abdomen, watching his reactions to the unpredictable sensations. But there appeared to be no one watching out for him, monitoring to see that he was coming to no harm, and so Marthe had taken it upon herself to check in with him periodically, asking if he needed a break or water or wanted to pause.
She checked in with him so often, in fact, that he eventually hissed that he was busy trying to catch a murderer and she should mind her own business. But when the party was winding down and he had been released from the cuffs by their absent-minded host, he sought her out and introduced himself, thanked her for her care and asked if she wanted to help him with his case.
Which is what led her here, to this desert, where more buildings had appeared on the horizon, and Sherlock finally told her she could pull off the highway and park.
They were in a town called California City. A quintessential California boom town, filled with rapidly built subdivisions of identical modest ranch houses and the absolute latest in urban planning, circa 1960; but in this case the boom never came. The huckster of a real estate agent whose brilliant idea it was to found the city failed to convert much of anyone at all to his vision, and so now cracked pavement ended abruptly in desert dirt, and while the town could support a liquor store and a payday loan office, it did not even appear to have a grocery store.
They parked in front of the local Lions club, where Sherlock wished to interview several of the members, each of them more shaky and rambling than the last. Sherlock still seemed off his game as Marthe had observed it to date, by turns sharply frustrated and nearly absent-minded. But something in what they told him led them to the town’s Central Park, Sherlock pushing the pace despite the oppressive summer heat.
The park had pretty bones – low, sculpted hills, winding paths, a meandering creek and carefully shaped pond surrounded by eucalyptus trees. But every inch of it spoke of neglect: the padlocked bathrooms, the patchiness of the grass, the shrubbery growing into the paths, the slightly off odor of the water. And there was not another soul anywhere within sight.
They made their way deeper in, past some machinery (likely for the pond) gamely chugging away in the heat, creaky and cantankerous but apparently still operational. Sherlock started at the sputter of the generator, and nearly jumped when a car backfired in the distance. The trees grew close around them, leaves murmuring in the breeze kicking up from the west. Just as the path narrowed far enough to force them to walk single-file, it opened out into a small clearing.
And here, apparently, was their destination, because Sherlock started into a run. They clambered gracelessly over a chain-link fence that was losing its fight with gravity, then began to pick their way through broken concrete and abandoned building materials towards what was once clearly intended to be a gracious and welcoming hotel.
One whole face of the building was exposed, like a dollhouse, displaying all its rooms. The floors creaked threateningly as they made their way through the lobby and up the staircase. Sherlock began searching the rooms for something, but he waved Marthe irritably off when she asked what exactly he was searching for so that she could help. He moved through the space frenetically, careless of the building materials stacked haphazardly all around, of the exposed bits of wiring that no one ever got around to hiding behind drywall. And the further in they moved, the higher they climbed, the more the building seemed to sway around them.
Eventually, something gave. Sherlock’s foot went through a floorboard, and as he flailed trying to right himself he knocked over a stack of two-by-fours. Marthe jumped out of the way and grabbed his arm, pulling him back to more solid ground, but when the dust settled and she was sure that nothing else was going to fall, she found him staring, transfixed, at the long gash that one of the falling planks had left on his arm.
His pupils were blown wide with adrenaline, and his breathing was shallow, but Marthe suspected the reaction was not solely a result of the near-fall.
“Sherlock.”
No response.
“Sherlock.” More forcefully.
He blinked, but still did not take his eyes off the blood welling up through the jagged tear in his flesh.
Marthe took a breath to gather herself, then made her voice crack out like a whip into the silence.
“Sherlock. Enough.” And she took his hand to pull the wound out of his sight.
He blinked, muddled, for a moment, then snapped back into focus on Marthe’s face. She watched his hackles rise as he recognized his vulnerability and moved to defend against it.
“Really, Ms. Hudson, I must ask that you unhand me—“
Acting on instinct, Marthe grabbed his uninjured arm and dug her nails sharply into the underside of his wrist.
“Enough. You are in no fit state to continue investigating today. We are going to get your arm cleaned up and then find an actual, working motel. You can continue in the morning.”
Sherlock opened his mouth to protest again, but stilled at the firmly negative shake of her head. Marthe switched her grip to encircle rather than prick his wrist, then led him carefully back outside into the sun.
He assured her that he had recently had a tetanus shot, so they found the town’s sole drug store and cleaned him up in the bathroom of the McDonald’s next door. There was a motel half a mile back down the highway that seemed clean enough, but it wasn’t until the door to their room was closed and locked that Marthe finally broke contact with Sherlock’s skin.
When she met his eyes again, after putting several feet of space deliberately between them, she found him watching her with sharp curiosity.
“I would not have pegged you as Dominant at all.”
Marthe rolled her eyes. “Just because I don’t particularly enjoy it doesn’t mean I can’t see a need and choose to fill it.”
Sherlock huffed right back. “I would hardly characterize it as a need. . .”
“Sherlock.”
“Very well. Perhaps I have found, on occasion, that the world is. . . distracting. And that there are. . . activities. . . that I can undertake, which better allow me to focus.”
Marthe made her voice very gentle. “I offered to help you solve this case in whatever way you needed, Sherlock. I truly did mean that.”
And he smiled, shy and suddenly sweet. “Oh. Well then. Yes. Please.”
He woke the next morning just as the sun was breaking the horizon and tumbled Marthe unceremoniously out of bed, demanding she move faster, faster. He rushed unerringly back to the tumble-down hotel in the park, to one of the rooms he had searched restlessly the day before and, carefully now, pried apart a rusty toolbox to expose a sheaf of letters, weathered with age. He flipped through the first couple and then crowed, finding the admission he needed.
The LAPD took his suspect into custody only a few hours later.
In all the years since, Sherlock had only asked Marthe to help him in that way two more times; he began turning to professionals rather than risk his needs interfering with his cases again. But she held the memory of him kneeling in the middle of that motel bed, expression broken open and so brightly trusting, close to her heart, to keep her warm when her own doubts and the loudness of the world around her began to wear.
no subject
Date: 2017-12-14 06:38 am (UTC)I was born and raised in the L.A. area, I've DRIVEN those freeways in my 1988 Corolla(!), I could see everything from the bigwig's party house in the Hollywood hills to the neglected park in the abandoned subdivision.
I'd never have placed Elementary's Sherlock nor Marthe Hudson in Los Angeles, but you've done a wonderful job locating them both there for their own reasons. Marthe has the heart of a good Dom here, making sure the Sub is okay.
You've beautifully captured all three of the characters here: Sherlock, Marthe, and L.A.
Great job!
no subject
Date: 2017-12-19 05:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-12-20 03:08 pm (UTC)