Fic for sadbhyl: A Life Well Spent
Dec. 19th, 2010 08:32 am![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
colebaltblue.livejournal.com posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
holmesticeTitle: A Life Well Spent
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
storylandqueen
Recipientsadbhyl
Characters/Pairings: Mike Stamford, Mike/OFC
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: None
Summary:Maybe he never scaled Everest, but that didn't mean his life was pointless.
Notes: Many thanks to [redacted] for the title and the beta.
Mike Stamford died when he was eighty-four years old. He was buried in a small graveyard out in the country in a grave between a stranger and his wife, and had a line from the Hippocratic oath etched into his tombstone. It wasn’t an excessively large funeral, but the modest crowd had good things to say, pleasant recollections of the mild man. They murmured to each other in low voices, asked each other if they’d seem him near the end, asked if he was in pain, if he was happy with his life.
Mike was a sweet man, and a very dear man, but he didn’t tend to share much, always preferring to be the reliable shoulder rather than the one going on about their problems. They couldn’t ask anymore, but the answers to their questions were no, he wasn’t in pain, and yes, he was happy with his life. It was a rather plain life, he would have told them, a bit dull and boring, but he liked it and he wouldn’t have changed it for the world. It might not have been much, but it was his life and he thought it was worth something; there were even some things he was pretty damn proud of.
If anyone could have asked what, he would have told them this:
Mike’s father and his grandfather were both hard laborers, men that made their living working with their hands on jobs that left them tired and aching, but always made enough money to feed their family, which was the point of it all. Mike has memories of taking care to be quiet once his Dad went to sleep and of the phone ringing in the middle of the night, the company wanting their worker back. His Dad never passed up a chance to work, regardless of how cold it was, if it was a holiday, if he was sick, or anything like that.
His memories of his grandfather were similar, a tireless worker that he sometimes saw on weekends that liked to sit out on the back and often fell asleep, body slumping over to the side in the chair. Usually when he went out there, he would sit in his chair and whittle away at a piece of wood with a knife and, if Mike was patient, he would tell Mike stories about being a soldier and all the things he’d seen. Sometimes he would bring over a wood carving or a little plaque with some saying burned into it. Next to their front door was a set of iron posts that held the collection of signs, each one connected to the other with slender chains. There were enough of the signs that they almost reached the ground and his Mum would tease his grandfather about how he was making her run out of room.
When a neighbor found his grandfather on the floor of his workshop, dead from a heart attack, there was a plank of wood with half a saying burned into its front lying nearby. Mike’s father finished burning in the words a few weeks after the funeral and that sign didn’t go hanging from the post with the rest, but was attached to the front of their door.
That was two months before Mike graduated high school and Mike had been too busy listening to his grandfather’s stories to ever tell him what he planned to do with his life. Mike wanted to go to college, something neither his father nor grandfather had even done, and train to be a doctor. The thing that stuck with Mike the most from his grandfather’s stories was all the death, the tales of horror and lost friends he never seemed to run out of.
His father’s reaction to the news was a pensive silence, then a hand on his shoulder. They didn’t really talk about it much, but Mike knew he had his father’s support, and that was really all he needed. He wanted to make his family proud, so Mike studied hard once he entered college, putting his studies before partying unlike the rest of his classmates. Sometimes, when he was up late until the middle of the night, Mike wondered about his father and grandfather, how many nights they’d went without sleep because of their jobs. Their strength and resolve would always motive Mike to press on and live up to their expectations.
When Mike finished college, his dad smiled. A few weeks later, he had a stroke and Mike couldn’t stop hovering, asking the doctors every question he could think of and researching everything they said with more fervor than he devoted to anything else. The day his Dad was released from the hospital, he said he could hardly follow a word Mike said with the doctors, but he would rather have Mike looking after him than anyone else.
At that point in his life, Mike had never been prouder.
When Mike was twenty-two, he was working in an ER during cold season and half the staff seemed to be sick, so they were short-handed when the traffic accident happened. The halls were filled with gurneys, people bleeding and moaning, asking for help as the doctors and nurses darted about, trying to take care of their patients as quickly as they could.
Most of those involved in the accident lived, although inevitably, some of them died. One man, a father in his early forties, died shortly after being brought in and stayed that way for one minute and forty-three seconds before Mike brought him back.
There were people in need all around and not enough medical professionals to take care of them, but Mike stayed with that man, pressing on his chest and breathing for him as the people surrounding them cried. The man made it into a room and he breathed again, and then Mike was off, helping the next patient and trying to help them through.
Some of them didn’t make it, but Mike thought back to that man and thought of success as he kept pushing forward. There was the niggling thought in the back of his mind that maybe the man had since passed on, that perhaps he’d died after Mike had left, but Mike worked until he felt he couldn’t stand up anymore.
He didn’t know how long he’d worked that day, probably no one did, but more doctors had come in and things were calming down, the patients were in rooms and the chaos had subsided. Mike didn’t even consider going home, instead passing out on a little cot at the hospital, his coat draped over him as a makeshift blanket. It wasn’t the most restful sleep and he only managed a few hours, but at least he could walk straight after he got up, and the first thing he did was go searching for information about the man from earlier.
As it turned out, the patient had been asking about him, too.
Finding out the man, Harold, had lived was like a weight off Mike’s mind and he went to check on him later that day. When he entered the room, Harold’s teenage son leapt from the chair next to the bed and thanked Mike for what he’d done. His father was lying in a hospital bed with a broken leg, an IV in his arm and tubes in his nose, but thanks to Mike, he was alive.
Eleven years later, Mike was giving a lecture and he met that young man again. He’d taken the lecture just because he remembered Mike’s name and later on that after, they had coffee to catch up. That young man had grown up to become a doctor, just because Mike saved his Dad’s life.
Mike met Angelie at the hospital when he was twenty-six and she was twenty. She was a waif, painfully thin and fair, but absolutely beautiful in a way that was reminiscent of a classical picture of a tragic youth. She was a homeless girl with a horrible case of pneumonia, dehydration, and malnutrition brought in by some passing good Samaritan who’d stumbled across her unconscious form during an early morning work commute.
Mike was in charge of her and took care of her, constantly checking her vitals and talking to her, no matter if she was unconscious or in some feverish haze. Something about Angelie was so soft and vulnerable that on first sight, Mike wanted to protect her. He would go to her room during breaks, after he got off shift, and during any spare moment he could find to spend time with her, talk to her and just try to make sure she was okay.
Angelie, for her part, seemed to glow from the attention after she’d gotten used to it. The first few times he visited, she viewed his attention with distrust, skeptical and wary about the reason behind his care, but she adjusted and began to flourish, soaking up his affection like a flower with sunshine. She proved herself to be sweet and kind with an understanding of emotional complexity that had the peculiar side-effect of making her think she somehow deserved less than everyone else. It made Mike want to hold her and say whatever it took to reassure her that wasn’t true, that she was so good and so worthy of amazing things.
Their bond grew quickly and it almost seemed as though they talked about everything, even though Mike knew they didn’t, because as much as he wanted to, he never asked Angelie how long she’d been on the streets, never asked what happened to her family or if she had anywhere to go. Those were things it didn’t seem proper to ask questions about and Mike was okay with waiting until she felt comfortable talking to him about it. He wanted to wait for it, wanted to be around long enough to trust him with her past and open up to him, again, like a flower to sunshine.
He wanted to be that for her, be her sunlight and bring brightness to her life and get rid of all the darkness that lingered in her eyes when she thought of her past, erase all the memories that make her face fall, crumpled with sadness. Mike always wanted to be the one to make her bloom and come into her own as a person, grow into the youthful beauty he could see hiding inside, the person that wanted to unfurl, but was afraid of being stomped into the ground.
It wasn’t long before Mike ran out of good reasons to keep Angelie in the hospital, but he couldn’t bear to just let her check out. No matter what she’d made it through, Mike didn’t think she was physically strong enough to make it through the winter, but mostly he was scared of watching her disappear back into the streets and never seeing her again.
On her last day in the hospital, Mike walked into Angelie’s room while she was braiding her hair, her hospital gown lying on the bed and her dirty coat lying next to it. As soon as Angelie was finished with the braid, she planned to put it on and walk not only out of the hospital, but out of Mike’s life, and he wasn’t sure he could take it.
He wanted to ask if Angelie had somewhere to stay, if there was a way he could contact her, keep in touch and make sure she was doing okay. Maybe they could meet up every so often at a restaurant and he could buy her lunch, or just anything to give them the chance to catch up occasionally.
Instead, Mike asked her to move in with him.
It was impetuous and foolish and altogether too soon, but Mike didn’t care because he couldn’t stand to lose her. He wasn’t surprised that, a few months into her stay, he checked in on her and found himself whispering ‘I love you’, but he was surprised when, a month later, Angelie kissed him.
Mike tried to tell himself that it was only because he was there, that of course Angelie would kiss him, he might be the first person to ever be kind to her and she was confused. He took care of Angelie, took her in and gave her a home, whatever she wanted, it was only natural that she develop some kind of feelings for him. But it wasn’t love, he told himself constantly, it was merely misinterpreted gratitude. That didn’t stop him from kissing her back.
He told himself every night that it was a bad idea, that he would end up hurting her, that he was taking an unfair advantage because she depending on him and the idea that Angelie might think that she owed him her affection made Mike sick. He would toss and turn in bed, unable to fall asleep as he wondered what the right thing to do was. If he should break things off, or just disappear, leave her the house and some money while he went to a new city to start over. He didn’t know what to do, but when he looked at Angelie’s sleeping face, he knew that leaving her would break his heart.
When morning would come, the alarm would wake them up and the sunlight would be breaching the window curtains, making Angelie’s face look soft and glowing as she gave a bleary smile. Usually she would murmur ‘good morning’, but one day she must have seen something in his face, the morning light must have illumined his secret fears and worries because Angelie took on a quiet air and she bit her lip before whispering to him in a serious voice.
She whispered that she loved him and Mike finally believed she meant it with her entire soul.
When Mike proposed to her, it was his family telling him that he was being foolish, that he didn’t know what he was doing and it would end in pain and heartbreak. They told him he was young and didn’t know what he wanted; they said she was younger and would leave when she got tired of him. They said it was too quick, they were moving too fast and they would burn out at the same speed and leave each other scarred.
Mike didn’t listen to them and married Angelie on her birthday, promising to spend his entire life making her feel like every day was a dream come true. Angelie actually laughed at that and her vows made it sound as though she couldn’t imagine anything more wonderful than Mike being there whenever she woke up. It made Mike’s heart jump into his throat and he stopped breathing, smile frozen on his face because the moment was so perfect that he didn’t want to move and make it go away.
Then she was announced as his wife and they started the rest of their lives together with a kiss that was a promise he would never love someone as much as he loved her. To Mike, Angelie was perfect and he loved her endlessly, no matter what anyone else said.
They were just short of their four year anniversary when Angelie died, taking half Mike’s heart with her into the ground. Losing her hurt more than Mike had ever imagined it would and for a time, it was all he could do to keep breathing. Without Angelie, so much of his life just seemed to disappear, but despite the pain, Mike never stopped being grateful that she’d been in his life.
Angelie had given him so much, and she still was, even in death. Four years later, Mike would watch the child Angelie had died bringing into the world dab paint onto a sheet of paper and see the beginning of an artistic ability inherited from her. Looking into his son’s blue eyes, so like Angelie’s, Mike could never bring himself to regret anything.
It was a cold, gray Sunday in November and as Mike sat down at the kitchen table, he could hear his son strumming on his guitar in his room, the teenage appreciation of music beginning to bloom. Humming along as Toby played a Beatles song, Mike picked up the paper and grinned at the headline, pushing up his glasses before flipping the newspaper open.
The headline proclaimed in bold, capitalized letters that the mystery of the recent jewel heist had been solved, the diamonds returned and the killer of the store clerk apprehended. Below that was a large picture of a grey-haired DI and standing next to him with his face turned away was a tall, thin man in a long coat with short, curly hair. Right behind him was a shorter man in a jumper, staring at the man in the coat with a mix of fondness and exasperation on his face.
The individuals in the photo were named in tiny script below the image, but Mike didn’t need to read it to know who the men were – he’d introduced them, after all. It had been a few years since then, but they’d been memorable. Sherlock and John hadn’t been living together for even a week before they solved their first case together and Mike was always more than happy to listen to John’s stories of life with Sherlock. He tracked them through the newspaper, too, checked each day to keep up with their cases and kept an ear out for hospital gossip about the pair.
It was interesting to watch the way the two men grew and evolved with each other. Mike had known John before the war and the man he met afterwards wasn’t the one he remembered, but the one who called himself Sherlock’s flatmate… he was a bit closer, he felt like the right kind of person John should be.
As for Sherlock, the changes in him weren’t quite as noticeable if you didn’t know how to look, but Mike could tell. Sherlock became more obliging towards social norms, biting his tongue and trying to slow down enough to explain what he was thinking without calling everyone around him an idiot.
Sherlock had always been clever, but after he met John, it was as if they’d both suddenly balanced out and together they were incredible. They were a brilliant, unstoppable team and there was a flow to their interaction that sometimes left Mike staring in amazement.
He’d lost count of how many cases the two had solved together, but just thinking about it brought a sense of accomplishment to Mike because while it was true they were the ones solving the crimes, he was the one responsible for bringing them together. If not for him, the two of them would have went on with their lives and maybe never met, never turned into a spectacular pair of crime solvers that managed to save each others lives in more ways than one. London was a much better place with them together, and it never would have happened if Mike hadn’t thought to introduce an old friend to a genius.
Not even Sherlock Holmes had ever made a move that smart.
Author:
storylandqueenRecipient
sadbhylCharacters/Pairings: Mike Stamford, Mike/OFC
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: None
Summary:Maybe he never scaled Everest, but that didn't mean his life was pointless.
Notes: Many thanks to [redacted] for the title and the beta.
Mike Stamford died when he was eighty-four years old. He was buried in a small graveyard out in the country in a grave between a stranger and his wife, and had a line from the Hippocratic oath etched into his tombstone. It wasn’t an excessively large funeral, but the modest crowd had good things to say, pleasant recollections of the mild man. They murmured to each other in low voices, asked each other if they’d seem him near the end, asked if he was in pain, if he was happy with his life.
Mike was a sweet man, and a very dear man, but he didn’t tend to share much, always preferring to be the reliable shoulder rather than the one going on about their problems. They couldn’t ask anymore, but the answers to their questions were no, he wasn’t in pain, and yes, he was happy with his life. It was a rather plain life, he would have told them, a bit dull and boring, but he liked it and he wouldn’t have changed it for the world. It might not have been much, but it was his life and he thought it was worth something; there were even some things he was pretty damn proud of.
If anyone could have asked what, he would have told them this:
Mike’s father and his grandfather were both hard laborers, men that made their living working with their hands on jobs that left them tired and aching, but always made enough money to feed their family, which was the point of it all. Mike has memories of taking care to be quiet once his Dad went to sleep and of the phone ringing in the middle of the night, the company wanting their worker back. His Dad never passed up a chance to work, regardless of how cold it was, if it was a holiday, if he was sick, or anything like that.
His memories of his grandfather were similar, a tireless worker that he sometimes saw on weekends that liked to sit out on the back and often fell asleep, body slumping over to the side in the chair. Usually when he went out there, he would sit in his chair and whittle away at a piece of wood with a knife and, if Mike was patient, he would tell Mike stories about being a soldier and all the things he’d seen. Sometimes he would bring over a wood carving or a little plaque with some saying burned into it. Next to their front door was a set of iron posts that held the collection of signs, each one connected to the other with slender chains. There were enough of the signs that they almost reached the ground and his Mum would tease his grandfather about how he was making her run out of room.
When a neighbor found his grandfather on the floor of his workshop, dead from a heart attack, there was a plank of wood with half a saying burned into its front lying nearby. Mike’s father finished burning in the words a few weeks after the funeral and that sign didn’t go hanging from the post with the rest, but was attached to the front of their door.
That was two months before Mike graduated high school and Mike had been too busy listening to his grandfather’s stories to ever tell him what he planned to do with his life. Mike wanted to go to college, something neither his father nor grandfather had even done, and train to be a doctor. The thing that stuck with Mike the most from his grandfather’s stories was all the death, the tales of horror and lost friends he never seemed to run out of.
His father’s reaction to the news was a pensive silence, then a hand on his shoulder. They didn’t really talk about it much, but Mike knew he had his father’s support, and that was really all he needed. He wanted to make his family proud, so Mike studied hard once he entered college, putting his studies before partying unlike the rest of his classmates. Sometimes, when he was up late until the middle of the night, Mike wondered about his father and grandfather, how many nights they’d went without sleep because of their jobs. Their strength and resolve would always motive Mike to press on and live up to their expectations.
When Mike finished college, his dad smiled. A few weeks later, he had a stroke and Mike couldn’t stop hovering, asking the doctors every question he could think of and researching everything they said with more fervor than he devoted to anything else. The day his Dad was released from the hospital, he said he could hardly follow a word Mike said with the doctors, but he would rather have Mike looking after him than anyone else.
At that point in his life, Mike had never been prouder.
When Mike was twenty-two, he was working in an ER during cold season and half the staff seemed to be sick, so they were short-handed when the traffic accident happened. The halls were filled with gurneys, people bleeding and moaning, asking for help as the doctors and nurses darted about, trying to take care of their patients as quickly as they could.
Most of those involved in the accident lived, although inevitably, some of them died. One man, a father in his early forties, died shortly after being brought in and stayed that way for one minute and forty-three seconds before Mike brought him back.
There were people in need all around and not enough medical professionals to take care of them, but Mike stayed with that man, pressing on his chest and breathing for him as the people surrounding them cried. The man made it into a room and he breathed again, and then Mike was off, helping the next patient and trying to help them through.
Some of them didn’t make it, but Mike thought back to that man and thought of success as he kept pushing forward. There was the niggling thought in the back of his mind that maybe the man had since passed on, that perhaps he’d died after Mike had left, but Mike worked until he felt he couldn’t stand up anymore.
He didn’t know how long he’d worked that day, probably no one did, but more doctors had come in and things were calming down, the patients were in rooms and the chaos had subsided. Mike didn’t even consider going home, instead passing out on a little cot at the hospital, his coat draped over him as a makeshift blanket. It wasn’t the most restful sleep and he only managed a few hours, but at least he could walk straight after he got up, and the first thing he did was go searching for information about the man from earlier.
As it turned out, the patient had been asking about him, too.
Finding out the man, Harold, had lived was like a weight off Mike’s mind and he went to check on him later that day. When he entered the room, Harold’s teenage son leapt from the chair next to the bed and thanked Mike for what he’d done. His father was lying in a hospital bed with a broken leg, an IV in his arm and tubes in his nose, but thanks to Mike, he was alive.
Eleven years later, Mike was giving a lecture and he met that young man again. He’d taken the lecture just because he remembered Mike’s name and later on that after, they had coffee to catch up. That young man had grown up to become a doctor, just because Mike saved his Dad’s life.
Mike met Angelie at the hospital when he was twenty-six and she was twenty. She was a waif, painfully thin and fair, but absolutely beautiful in a way that was reminiscent of a classical picture of a tragic youth. She was a homeless girl with a horrible case of pneumonia, dehydration, and malnutrition brought in by some passing good Samaritan who’d stumbled across her unconscious form during an early morning work commute.
Mike was in charge of her and took care of her, constantly checking her vitals and talking to her, no matter if she was unconscious or in some feverish haze. Something about Angelie was so soft and vulnerable that on first sight, Mike wanted to protect her. He would go to her room during breaks, after he got off shift, and during any spare moment he could find to spend time with her, talk to her and just try to make sure she was okay.
Angelie, for her part, seemed to glow from the attention after she’d gotten used to it. The first few times he visited, she viewed his attention with distrust, skeptical and wary about the reason behind his care, but she adjusted and began to flourish, soaking up his affection like a flower with sunshine. She proved herself to be sweet and kind with an understanding of emotional complexity that had the peculiar side-effect of making her think she somehow deserved less than everyone else. It made Mike want to hold her and say whatever it took to reassure her that wasn’t true, that she was so good and so worthy of amazing things.
Their bond grew quickly and it almost seemed as though they talked about everything, even though Mike knew they didn’t, because as much as he wanted to, he never asked Angelie how long she’d been on the streets, never asked what happened to her family or if she had anywhere to go. Those were things it didn’t seem proper to ask questions about and Mike was okay with waiting until she felt comfortable talking to him about it. He wanted to wait for it, wanted to be around long enough to trust him with her past and open up to him, again, like a flower to sunshine.
He wanted to be that for her, be her sunlight and bring brightness to her life and get rid of all the darkness that lingered in her eyes when she thought of her past, erase all the memories that make her face fall, crumpled with sadness. Mike always wanted to be the one to make her bloom and come into her own as a person, grow into the youthful beauty he could see hiding inside, the person that wanted to unfurl, but was afraid of being stomped into the ground.
It wasn’t long before Mike ran out of good reasons to keep Angelie in the hospital, but he couldn’t bear to just let her check out. No matter what she’d made it through, Mike didn’t think she was physically strong enough to make it through the winter, but mostly he was scared of watching her disappear back into the streets and never seeing her again.
On her last day in the hospital, Mike walked into Angelie’s room while she was braiding her hair, her hospital gown lying on the bed and her dirty coat lying next to it. As soon as Angelie was finished with the braid, she planned to put it on and walk not only out of the hospital, but out of Mike’s life, and he wasn’t sure he could take it.
He wanted to ask if Angelie had somewhere to stay, if there was a way he could contact her, keep in touch and make sure she was doing okay. Maybe they could meet up every so often at a restaurant and he could buy her lunch, or just anything to give them the chance to catch up occasionally.
Instead, Mike asked her to move in with him.
It was impetuous and foolish and altogether too soon, but Mike didn’t care because he couldn’t stand to lose her. He wasn’t surprised that, a few months into her stay, he checked in on her and found himself whispering ‘I love you’, but he was surprised when, a month later, Angelie kissed him.
Mike tried to tell himself that it was only because he was there, that of course Angelie would kiss him, he might be the first person to ever be kind to her and she was confused. He took care of Angelie, took her in and gave her a home, whatever she wanted, it was only natural that she develop some kind of feelings for him. But it wasn’t love, he told himself constantly, it was merely misinterpreted gratitude. That didn’t stop him from kissing her back.
He told himself every night that it was a bad idea, that he would end up hurting her, that he was taking an unfair advantage because she depending on him and the idea that Angelie might think that she owed him her affection made Mike sick. He would toss and turn in bed, unable to fall asleep as he wondered what the right thing to do was. If he should break things off, or just disappear, leave her the house and some money while he went to a new city to start over. He didn’t know what to do, but when he looked at Angelie’s sleeping face, he knew that leaving her would break his heart.
When morning would come, the alarm would wake them up and the sunlight would be breaching the window curtains, making Angelie’s face look soft and glowing as she gave a bleary smile. Usually she would murmur ‘good morning’, but one day she must have seen something in his face, the morning light must have illumined his secret fears and worries because Angelie took on a quiet air and she bit her lip before whispering to him in a serious voice.
She whispered that she loved him and Mike finally believed she meant it with her entire soul.
When Mike proposed to her, it was his family telling him that he was being foolish, that he didn’t know what he was doing and it would end in pain and heartbreak. They told him he was young and didn’t know what he wanted; they said she was younger and would leave when she got tired of him. They said it was too quick, they were moving too fast and they would burn out at the same speed and leave each other scarred.
Mike didn’t listen to them and married Angelie on her birthday, promising to spend his entire life making her feel like every day was a dream come true. Angelie actually laughed at that and her vows made it sound as though she couldn’t imagine anything more wonderful than Mike being there whenever she woke up. It made Mike’s heart jump into his throat and he stopped breathing, smile frozen on his face because the moment was so perfect that he didn’t want to move and make it go away.
Then she was announced as his wife and they started the rest of their lives together with a kiss that was a promise he would never love someone as much as he loved her. To Mike, Angelie was perfect and he loved her endlessly, no matter what anyone else said.
They were just short of their four year anniversary when Angelie died, taking half Mike’s heart with her into the ground. Losing her hurt more than Mike had ever imagined it would and for a time, it was all he could do to keep breathing. Without Angelie, so much of his life just seemed to disappear, but despite the pain, Mike never stopped being grateful that she’d been in his life.
Angelie had given him so much, and she still was, even in death. Four years later, Mike would watch the child Angelie had died bringing into the world dab paint onto a sheet of paper and see the beginning of an artistic ability inherited from her. Looking into his son’s blue eyes, so like Angelie’s, Mike could never bring himself to regret anything.
It was a cold, gray Sunday in November and as Mike sat down at the kitchen table, he could hear his son strumming on his guitar in his room, the teenage appreciation of music beginning to bloom. Humming along as Toby played a Beatles song, Mike picked up the paper and grinned at the headline, pushing up his glasses before flipping the newspaper open.
The headline proclaimed in bold, capitalized letters that the mystery of the recent jewel heist had been solved, the diamonds returned and the killer of the store clerk apprehended. Below that was a large picture of a grey-haired DI and standing next to him with his face turned away was a tall, thin man in a long coat with short, curly hair. Right behind him was a shorter man in a jumper, staring at the man in the coat with a mix of fondness and exasperation on his face.
The individuals in the photo were named in tiny script below the image, but Mike didn’t need to read it to know who the men were – he’d introduced them, after all. It had been a few years since then, but they’d been memorable. Sherlock and John hadn’t been living together for even a week before they solved their first case together and Mike was always more than happy to listen to John’s stories of life with Sherlock. He tracked them through the newspaper, too, checked each day to keep up with their cases and kept an ear out for hospital gossip about the pair.
It was interesting to watch the way the two men grew and evolved with each other. Mike had known John before the war and the man he met afterwards wasn’t the one he remembered, but the one who called himself Sherlock’s flatmate… he was a bit closer, he felt like the right kind of person John should be.
As for Sherlock, the changes in him weren’t quite as noticeable if you didn’t know how to look, but Mike could tell. Sherlock became more obliging towards social norms, biting his tongue and trying to slow down enough to explain what he was thinking without calling everyone around him an idiot.
Sherlock had always been clever, but after he met John, it was as if they’d both suddenly balanced out and together they were incredible. They were a brilliant, unstoppable team and there was a flow to their interaction that sometimes left Mike staring in amazement.
He’d lost count of how many cases the two had solved together, but just thinking about it brought a sense of accomplishment to Mike because while it was true they were the ones solving the crimes, he was the one responsible for bringing them together. If not for him, the two of them would have went on with their lives and maybe never met, never turned into a spectacular pair of crime solvers that managed to save each others lives in more ways than one. London was a much better place with them together, and it never would have happened if Mike hadn’t thought to introduce an old friend to a genius.
Not even Sherlock Holmes had ever made a move that smart.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2010-12-19 07:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-19 08:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-20 05:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-30 04:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-31 07:16 pm (UTC)Thank you. I have a sudden desire for more of Mike Stamford!
no subject
Date: 2011-04-24 01:05 am (UTC)