Mrs Hudson's House of Sweets, 2/4
Dec. 15th, 2010 04:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackofknavesTitle: Mrs Hudson's House of Sweets
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
tripatch
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: John/Lestrade
Summary: Kinkmeme prompt, Sometimes when funds get really tight, Sherlock and John work for Mrs Hudson down in her little sandwich store/bakery/corner shop. University AU.
Prologue
Chapter 1/4
Sherlock’s first day at the shop was doomed from the start. He had taken one look at the apron and outright refused. For someone who considered his body to be nothing more than transport, he was horribly finicky about what he put on it. John had seldom seen the man not perfectly dressed, as if he were going to a fashion shoot and not just to class or around the corner to Tesco’s.
Mrs Hudson had said that John had more experience, and they had both privately agreed that Sherlock was never to be allowed near anything that could potentially explode, and so would work in the back while Sherlock dealt with the customers. In theory, this was a good, solid divvying up of responsibilities. In reality, it was an utter disaster.
John hadn’t been in the back more than ten minutes when he first heard the raised voices. Alarmed, he grabbed a nearby towel to wipe off the worst of the flour decorating his forearms, and popped his head up front.
Sherlock was facing off with a customer over the register.
“What’s going on here?” John asked cautiously, stepping up to the counter.
“I want this man fired,” the customer said angrily. Her face was flushed dully with anger, hands clenched in fists by her side.
“I’m sure there’s just been a misunderstanding,” John said with an apologetic smile. He grabbed Sherlock’s arm and towed him a safe distance from the counter, dropping the smile. “What did you do?”
“Why is it my fault?” Sherlock protested. “All I said was that she would be better served finding a new husband rather than eating away her sorrows in sweets over the last.”
“Oh, is that all?” John said disbelievingly.
Sherlock coughed delicately. “I may have also inadvertently mentioned that he was cheating on her with his secretary well before he served her the divorce papers.”
Covering his face with one hand, John pointed to the ground with the other. “Stay here while I clean this mess up.”
Turning to the woman who was still quivering with rage and, John noted, trying desperately not to cry, John gave her a sympathetic look. “I’m so sorry about that, ma’am. He’s not very good with people.”
“But why’d he have to say that about Tommy?” the woman’s lower lip trembled. She sniffed, covering her mouth with one hand and sobbing loudly into it. Helplessly, John passed her a tissue and guided her to a seat, patting her shoulder consolingly and shooting glares at Sherlock. After gifting her with some biscuits which were not so much free as they were paid for out of John’s pocket, the woman left, still crying.
Sherlock, for his part, leaned over the counter, flipping idly through his chemistry textbook and looking for all the world like an innocent bystander in the whole affair.
After the woman had left, John whirled on his friend, flatmate, and now co-worker.
“What was that about?”
Sherlock finished writing, “WRONG” in the margins of his book before giving John an innocent look. “What do you mean?”
“If you think that’s going to get you out of working the front, you can forget it,” John said, gratified when Sherlock’s expression filtered through a moment of shock before settling into sullen. “Mrs Hudson is coming in soon and so you’d best not do that again, or else she’ll fire you on the spot.”
The threat was an idle one, they both knew it, but it was the best John could come up with at the moment. He returned to the back, leaving a small cloud of flour behind as he did so.
He heard the door chime a few minutes later as he was in the middle of kneading a ball of dough, then the quiet murmur of conversation. Sherlock poked his head through.
“Have we got any snickerdoodles?”
“What?”
“Sugar cookies with cinnamon on top.”
“No,” John said. “Tell whoever it is that we can make some if they want to wait.”
“Right.”
Sherlock disappeared, only to reappear a moment later. “She wants to know how long that would take.”
John sighed. “Um, about half an hour.”
The door swung shut again, and John internally counted down. He had just reached thirteen when Sherlock popped in again. “She says that’s too long. Can she leave and come back?”
“Yes,” John said exasperatedly. “And you know this, I know you do. Stop hoping that bothering me will get you out of it, because it won’t.”
The door had closed before he had even finished the sentence. He went back to kneading the dough, throwing his annoyance into punching it flat and beginning again, folding it and pounding it with his fists.
The door chimed again as another customer must have walked in. There was more quiet conversation, then suddenly an ominous silence. John managed to wait a full ten seconds before grabbing the towel and going to the front yet again.
A startlingly good looking young man leaned against the counter, dark hair falling forward into his face appealingly. The man had his hands braced on either side of the register, practically snarling, exposing slightly uneven teeth. John’s breath caught and he coughed to clear his throat.
“Can I help you?”
“You can tell him that he’d better watch his mouth,” the man said, gesturing to Sherlock, who was inspecting the glass display with undue interest.
“I’m sorry for whatever he may have said,” John apologised, not even bothering to ask what it was that had gotten him so riled. Morbid curiosity would have to wait. “He gets like that when he hasn’t had his nap.”
Sherlock’s head shot up and he opened his mouth to protest, but the customer’s warm laugh interrupted it. John felt his face flush with pleasure as the man stuck out his hand.
“Greg,” he said. “Greg Lestrade.”
John wiped off the flour on his hands discreetly on his apron, offering his own and shaking the calloused palm. “John Watson.”
“You look familiar, have I seen you before?” Greg squinted at him.
“Do you go to uni here?”
“Yeah, that’s where I know you from,” Greg said, snapping his fingers. “I’ve seen you in class. We had that batty old woman for Literature together.”
John’s eyes lit up in recognition. The young man had been quiet in the back of the class, barely noticeable, but John remembered sneaking peeks at him, feeling like a schoolgirl who drew her crush’s name on her paper, decorating it with tiny hearts floating around it. “Good memory.”
“You broke your ankle or something and came to class with a cane,” Greg said aloud. “Got better?”
“Yeah, much, thanks,” John said.
Sherlock harrumphed from the corner, drawing their attention back to him. “Touching. Can you please order and leave?”
“Sherlock!” John scolded him. He turned to Greg again, smiling genuinely. “Sorry about him.”
“No problem. He was like that in bio class, too, if I remember. Gave the teacher fits.”
Sherlock peered at him. “I remember you,” he suddenly announced. “Did you pass that class or did you just cheat off of Sally’s homework?”
“I just need a dozen oatmeal raisins,” he told John, ignoring Sherlock entirely.
“Sure,” John said, bending to retrieve them from the display. Deliberately casual, he asked, “For your girlfriend?”
Sherlock’s eyebrow raised in a way that said he knew exactly what John was doing and John shook his head viciously. There would be no marking of territory today, thank you very much.
Greg laughed. “Oh, God, no. Just going home for holiday. My mum loves them and I figured I need something to break the bad news to her.”
“Bad news?” John asked, passing the biscuits to Sherlock and indicating with a stern look that he was to package them. Sherlock grumbled a bit, but did so.
“I’m switching degrees,” Greg said ruefully. “Mum wanted me to be a solicitor, but it’s too after the fact for me."
“So what are you doing now?” John said, not even having to feign interest. It helped that Greg was absolutely captivating without even appearing to know it.
“I want to be a copper,” Greg said with a shrug. “I always have, but mum insisted I at least try my hand at law. It’s fine, I’m just not cut out for it.”
The box of biscuits hit the counter with a dull thump.
“There you go,” Sherlock said with a fake smile. “Best of luck at the vocation change.”
“Thanks,” Greg said grudgingly. He flashed a smile at John. “Take care.”
“You too,” John waved him out. He turned to Sherlock and crossed his arms, staring at him accusingly.
“Yes?”
“ ‘Best of luck’?” John parroted him. “You’re never that nice.”
“He’ll need it,” Sherlock said sourly. “He was absolutely terrible in class. I’d be surprised if he knew the difference between eukaryote and prokaryote without dear Sally Donovan explaining it to him.”
“I hate you sometimes,” John announced. “I really, really do.”
Sherlock looked perversely pleased at the sentiment. “Thank you.”
Mrs Hudson showed up and went to work, busily whipping up her culinary masterpieces in the kitchen area while Sherlock managed to alienate, offend, or insult most of the customers. After the third stormed out, loudly vowing to report the shop to the Offices of Trading Standards, Mrs Hudson had tutted and switched John to the front and brought Sherlock to the back, despite John’s misgivings about Sherlock being allowed around anything that would be used to produce something edible.
“He’ll be fine, dear,” Mrs Hudson had assured him, ushering him to the front.
The first batch that came out was immediately thrown into the bin. The second was burnt to a crisp, looking like it had gone through the center of Hell and back. It joined the first. The third looked edible, but the first customer had taken one bite and cried out something about his tooth being chipped.
“Oh, Sherlock,” Mrs Hudson shook her head. “What a mess you’ve made.”
Sherlock, for his part, looked mostly smug beneath a put-on expression of dismay.
“I really tried with that batch,” he told Mrs Hudson earnestly. His face cleared and he clapped his hands. “Well, I suppose this didn’t work out. I’ll just have to work up front.”
He was halfway to the door when Mrs Hudson caught his arm with a smile that John had once seen on a nature documentary during Sherlock’s “Shark Week” phase.
“Oh, no, dearie,” she said, patting his arm. “You’ll never learn that way. I’ll just sit here and watch you make them until you get it right.”
Sherlock shot a panicked look at John, who just smiled and let the door close. It would serve him right.
The next batches came out flawlessly under Mrs Hudson’s sharp eye, Sherlock resentfully putting his chemistry knowledge to good use as he carefully measured out the ingredients and determined the perfect temperature and time for baking the perfect biscuit. Even John had to admit, taking a bite out of one of the sugary confections, that he had a hidden talent for it. He still wouldn’t trust him to make anything for dinner, but apparently even the great Sherlock Holmes was scared of Mrs Hudson’s grandmotherly façade. Now that he had resigned himself to his fate, he showed a prowess and almost obsessiveness with baking, toying with the mixtures and adding a hint of cinnamon in this, or a dash of nutmeg in that, until Mrs Hudson beamed with pleasure. At the end of their shift, Sherlock was flushed, his hair turned grey under a cloud of flour, and his apron covered with various stains.
Mrs Hudson slipped them both a bag of biscuits as they said goodbye and walked home.
Chapter 3/4
Chapter 4/4
Missing Scene
Author:
tripatchRating: PG-13
Pairing: John/Lestrade
Summary: Kinkmeme prompt, Sometimes when funds get really tight, Sherlock and John work for Mrs Hudson down in her little sandwich store/bakery/corner shop. University AU.
Prologue
Chapter 1/4
Sherlock’s first day at the shop was doomed from the start. He had taken one look at the apron and outright refused. For someone who considered his body to be nothing more than transport, he was horribly finicky about what he put on it. John had seldom seen the man not perfectly dressed, as if he were going to a fashion shoot and not just to class or around the corner to Tesco’s.
Mrs Hudson had said that John had more experience, and they had both privately agreed that Sherlock was never to be allowed near anything that could potentially explode, and so would work in the back while Sherlock dealt with the customers. In theory, this was a good, solid divvying up of responsibilities. In reality, it was an utter disaster.
John hadn’t been in the back more than ten minutes when he first heard the raised voices. Alarmed, he grabbed a nearby towel to wipe off the worst of the flour decorating his forearms, and popped his head up front.
Sherlock was facing off with a customer over the register.
“What’s going on here?” John asked cautiously, stepping up to the counter.
“I want this man fired,” the customer said angrily. Her face was flushed dully with anger, hands clenched in fists by her side.
“I’m sure there’s just been a misunderstanding,” John said with an apologetic smile. He grabbed Sherlock’s arm and towed him a safe distance from the counter, dropping the smile. “What did you do?”
“Why is it my fault?” Sherlock protested. “All I said was that she would be better served finding a new husband rather than eating away her sorrows in sweets over the last.”
“Oh, is that all?” John said disbelievingly.
Sherlock coughed delicately. “I may have also inadvertently mentioned that he was cheating on her with his secretary well before he served her the divorce papers.”
Covering his face with one hand, John pointed to the ground with the other. “Stay here while I clean this mess up.”
Turning to the woman who was still quivering with rage and, John noted, trying desperately not to cry, John gave her a sympathetic look. “I’m so sorry about that, ma’am. He’s not very good with people.”
“But why’d he have to say that about Tommy?” the woman’s lower lip trembled. She sniffed, covering her mouth with one hand and sobbing loudly into it. Helplessly, John passed her a tissue and guided her to a seat, patting her shoulder consolingly and shooting glares at Sherlock. After gifting her with some biscuits which were not so much free as they were paid for out of John’s pocket, the woman left, still crying.
Sherlock, for his part, leaned over the counter, flipping idly through his chemistry textbook and looking for all the world like an innocent bystander in the whole affair.
After the woman had left, John whirled on his friend, flatmate, and now co-worker.
“What was that about?”
Sherlock finished writing, “WRONG” in the margins of his book before giving John an innocent look. “What do you mean?”
“If you think that’s going to get you out of working the front, you can forget it,” John said, gratified when Sherlock’s expression filtered through a moment of shock before settling into sullen. “Mrs Hudson is coming in soon and so you’d best not do that again, or else she’ll fire you on the spot.”
The threat was an idle one, they both knew it, but it was the best John could come up with at the moment. He returned to the back, leaving a small cloud of flour behind as he did so.
He heard the door chime a few minutes later as he was in the middle of kneading a ball of dough, then the quiet murmur of conversation. Sherlock poked his head through.
“Have we got any snickerdoodles?”
“What?”
“Sugar cookies with cinnamon on top.”
“No,” John said. “Tell whoever it is that we can make some if they want to wait.”
“Right.”
Sherlock disappeared, only to reappear a moment later. “She wants to know how long that would take.”
John sighed. “Um, about half an hour.”
The door swung shut again, and John internally counted down. He had just reached thirteen when Sherlock popped in again. “She says that’s too long. Can she leave and come back?”
“Yes,” John said exasperatedly. “And you know this, I know you do. Stop hoping that bothering me will get you out of it, because it won’t.”
The door had closed before he had even finished the sentence. He went back to kneading the dough, throwing his annoyance into punching it flat and beginning again, folding it and pounding it with his fists.
The door chimed again as another customer must have walked in. There was more quiet conversation, then suddenly an ominous silence. John managed to wait a full ten seconds before grabbing the towel and going to the front yet again.
A startlingly good looking young man leaned against the counter, dark hair falling forward into his face appealingly. The man had his hands braced on either side of the register, practically snarling, exposing slightly uneven teeth. John’s breath caught and he coughed to clear his throat.
“Can I help you?”
“You can tell him that he’d better watch his mouth,” the man said, gesturing to Sherlock, who was inspecting the glass display with undue interest.
“I’m sorry for whatever he may have said,” John apologised, not even bothering to ask what it was that had gotten him so riled. Morbid curiosity would have to wait. “He gets like that when he hasn’t had his nap.”
Sherlock’s head shot up and he opened his mouth to protest, but the customer’s warm laugh interrupted it. John felt his face flush with pleasure as the man stuck out his hand.
“Greg,” he said. “Greg Lestrade.”
John wiped off the flour on his hands discreetly on his apron, offering his own and shaking the calloused palm. “John Watson.”
“You look familiar, have I seen you before?” Greg squinted at him.
“Do you go to uni here?”
“Yeah, that’s where I know you from,” Greg said, snapping his fingers. “I’ve seen you in class. We had that batty old woman for Literature together.”
John’s eyes lit up in recognition. The young man had been quiet in the back of the class, barely noticeable, but John remembered sneaking peeks at him, feeling like a schoolgirl who drew her crush’s name on her paper, decorating it with tiny hearts floating around it. “Good memory.”
“You broke your ankle or something and came to class with a cane,” Greg said aloud. “Got better?”
“Yeah, much, thanks,” John said.
Sherlock harrumphed from the corner, drawing their attention back to him. “Touching. Can you please order and leave?”
“Sherlock!” John scolded him. He turned to Greg again, smiling genuinely. “Sorry about him.”
“No problem. He was like that in bio class, too, if I remember. Gave the teacher fits.”
Sherlock peered at him. “I remember you,” he suddenly announced. “Did you pass that class or did you just cheat off of Sally’s homework?”
“I just need a dozen oatmeal raisins,” he told John, ignoring Sherlock entirely.
“Sure,” John said, bending to retrieve them from the display. Deliberately casual, he asked, “For your girlfriend?”
Sherlock’s eyebrow raised in a way that said he knew exactly what John was doing and John shook his head viciously. There would be no marking of territory today, thank you very much.
Greg laughed. “Oh, God, no. Just going home for holiday. My mum loves them and I figured I need something to break the bad news to her.”
“Bad news?” John asked, passing the biscuits to Sherlock and indicating with a stern look that he was to package them. Sherlock grumbled a bit, but did so.
“I’m switching degrees,” Greg said ruefully. “Mum wanted me to be a solicitor, but it’s too after the fact for me."
“So what are you doing now?” John said, not even having to feign interest. It helped that Greg was absolutely captivating without even appearing to know it.
“I want to be a copper,” Greg said with a shrug. “I always have, but mum insisted I at least try my hand at law. It’s fine, I’m just not cut out for it.”
The box of biscuits hit the counter with a dull thump.
“There you go,” Sherlock said with a fake smile. “Best of luck at the vocation change.”
“Thanks,” Greg said grudgingly. He flashed a smile at John. “Take care.”
“You too,” John waved him out. He turned to Sherlock and crossed his arms, staring at him accusingly.
“Yes?”
“ ‘Best of luck’?” John parroted him. “You’re never that nice.”
“He’ll need it,” Sherlock said sourly. “He was absolutely terrible in class. I’d be surprised if he knew the difference between eukaryote and prokaryote without dear Sally Donovan explaining it to him.”
“I hate you sometimes,” John announced. “I really, really do.”
Sherlock looked perversely pleased at the sentiment. “Thank you.”
Mrs Hudson showed up and went to work, busily whipping up her culinary masterpieces in the kitchen area while Sherlock managed to alienate, offend, or insult most of the customers. After the third stormed out, loudly vowing to report the shop to the Offices of Trading Standards, Mrs Hudson had tutted and switched John to the front and brought Sherlock to the back, despite John’s misgivings about Sherlock being allowed around anything that would be used to produce something edible.
“He’ll be fine, dear,” Mrs Hudson had assured him, ushering him to the front.
The first batch that came out was immediately thrown into the bin. The second was burnt to a crisp, looking like it had gone through the center of Hell and back. It joined the first. The third looked edible, but the first customer had taken one bite and cried out something about his tooth being chipped.
“Oh, Sherlock,” Mrs Hudson shook her head. “What a mess you’ve made.”
Sherlock, for his part, looked mostly smug beneath a put-on expression of dismay.
“I really tried with that batch,” he told Mrs Hudson earnestly. His face cleared and he clapped his hands. “Well, I suppose this didn’t work out. I’ll just have to work up front.”
He was halfway to the door when Mrs Hudson caught his arm with a smile that John had once seen on a nature documentary during Sherlock’s “Shark Week” phase.
“Oh, no, dearie,” she said, patting his arm. “You’ll never learn that way. I’ll just sit here and watch you make them until you get it right.”
Sherlock shot a panicked look at John, who just smiled and let the door close. It would serve him right.
The next batches came out flawlessly under Mrs Hudson’s sharp eye, Sherlock resentfully putting his chemistry knowledge to good use as he carefully measured out the ingredients and determined the perfect temperature and time for baking the perfect biscuit. Even John had to admit, taking a bite out of one of the sugary confections, that he had a hidden talent for it. He still wouldn’t trust him to make anything for dinner, but apparently even the great Sherlock Holmes was scared of Mrs Hudson’s grandmotherly façade. Now that he had resigned himself to his fate, he showed a prowess and almost obsessiveness with baking, toying with the mixtures and adding a hint of cinnamon in this, or a dash of nutmeg in that, until Mrs Hudson beamed with pleasure. At the end of their shift, Sherlock was flushed, his hair turned grey under a cloud of flour, and his apron covered with various stains.
Mrs Hudson slipped them both a bag of biscuits as they said goodbye and walked home.
Chapter 3/4
Chapter 4/4
Missing Scene
